Restrain this White House.

• Author: Fein, Bruce

Suppose Democrats capture control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. A conservative would instinctively cringe. On the domestic front, Democrats still don't get Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which teaches the superiority of free markets to government-regulated markets euphemistically styled "industrialization policy" or otherwise. Smith lacerated the economic philosophy of modern Democrats: "The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it." With Democrats controlling Congress, we could expect command-and-control laws requiring windmills on every farm, photovoltaic cells in every home, and hydrogen fuel in every car.

In foreign affairs, Democrats are stalled in the horse latitudes. They have no philosophical starting point. They sport no strategy for confronting the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the growing friction between Japan on the one hand and China and South Korea on the other. Beating swords into plowshares and making war no more is not a strategy but utopian faith.

So conservatives should weep if Democrats prevail in the House or Senate.

But perhaps not.

The most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power. Centuries of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."

But a Republican Congress has done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush's alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an echo chamber of the White House.

President Bush has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) for five years by directing the National Security Agency to target American...