brown paper bags to members of congress, by which i do not mean rod blagojevich corruption. nothing to do with influence peddling. i mean corruption relative to the framers' baseline. they gave us what they called a republic. by republic, they met a representative democracy. by representative democracy, in the words of madison, they meant a government that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people of law. -- people alone. the people and the government, producing an exclusive dependency and so would the public could be found through that exclusive dependency. here is the problem -- congress has evolved a different dependency, the dependence not upon the people alone, but increasingly a dependence on the funders.