In Constitutional Law, we try to understand how the world works. Usually we wind up determining how we hope it works, or should work.
If you'd like to know how it really works, you've got to read the newspapers to see the latest scandal. Things that earlier generations did seem scandalous to us.
Things that we do were so beyond conventional imagination that it couldn't be printed. FDR had an affair? JFK? Couldn't be printed.
Bill Clinton? Hell, Leno and Letterman still haven't let up over his indiscretion(s).
Those were Democrats.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Republican scandals include Watergate, and now House Majority Leader Tom De Lay, indicted in Texas for agreeing to funnel corporate money into Texas statehouse races in order to achieve Republican-slanted redistricting in order to increase the GOP majority in Congress. He'd accept corporate money from anywhere in the U.S. The allegation is influence peddling on a grand scale. Forget what the Framers intended, this is politics at its rawest.
Check the article below to see how it really works in Washington.