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Watching the recent disarray among Democrats after the Massachusetts special election, I was reminded of a comment by Will Rogers, the early 20th-century humorist. "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat," he said.

I wondered whether Rogers had any other insights about the current state of politics in the country and discovered after a little searching that amazingly little has changed since Rogers' day. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time.

For example, it turns out that Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did not create the idea of lockstep Republican unity. Consider Rogers' observation from nearly a century ago. "Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans."

Rogers also anticipated the antipathy and disdain that growing numbers of Americans seem to feel for both political parties today. He noted, way back then, that "the more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other." Rogers' comment seems more on target than the notion that Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts is the first sign of a new Republican resurgence. A pox on all of them is more likely to be the winning choice among voters.

You have to wonder what Will Rogers would have made of the twisted logic by which the U.S. Supreme Court recently nullified most of the nation's efforts at placing limits on the corrupting influence of campaign contributions on elections. He did, not surprisingly, have some thoughts on money and politics. As Jon Corzine learned, "Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated." Still, as the amount of money necessary to run increases election by election, Rogers likely would repeat another of his observations that "a fool and his money are soon elected."

Actually, even with his concerns about the impact of money in the early 20th century, Rogers likely would have been scratching his head, and coming up with appropriate zingers, about the court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Coming from justices that call themselves merely umpires (John Roberts) and believe that the original intent of the framers should guide their decisions (Antonin Scalia), the court has imposed its own view about the appropriate limits of spending above decades of precedent and numerous acts of the people's representatives in Congress.

And it's created the ludicrous fiction that a corporation has the same political rights as an individual, even though corporations in the modern form were not around when the First Amendment was written and were certainly not what the framers of the amendment had in mind. This is a court that has engaged in the most wild and irresponsible judicial activism, and not a word is heard from those conservatives who express outrage about the lack of judicial restraint when they disagree with a court decision.

It really is too bad that Will Rogers is no longer alive, because he would have been able to put Roberts, Scalia, et. al., in their place without the shrill commentary of much of today's cable news. They need to be mocked and derided for doing such damage to the Constitution and to our political system. Actually, this sounds like a job for Jon Stewart.

As Congress has stumbled its way through a year of tying itself in knots about health care reform and demonstrating that politics, posturing and procedures are more important to the members than solving problems and producing results, Rogers probably would have said that nothing has changed. He had some things to tell us about the congressional impulse to just say no. "Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees."

And Barack Obama might take comfort in another of Rogers' observations from a different era. "The Senate just sits and waits till they find out what the president wants, so they know how to vote against him." Perhaps Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, used that Rogers insight to develop his legislative strategy for health care.

While browsing through Will Rogers' comments on politics provides temporary relief and a few laughs, it is also a reminder of how little progress we have made in our approach to governing since his time. The stakes are higher and the risks greater, but we seem engaged in the same kind of sandbox politics that Rogers saw so many years ago.

Realizing that change in this area is unlikely, I would at least propose that we use one of Rogers' other ideas as the basis for setting policy in foreign affairs. "I have a scheme for stopping war. It's this — no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one."

Laslo Boyd is a partner at Gonzales Research and Marketing Strategies. He also teaches courses at both Towson University and the University of Baltimore. His e-mail address is lvboyd@gmail.com.