Is there an Engineer in the House ?

At last count, Congress Assembled contains two physicists, two chemists, two biologists, one geologist, 234 lawyers and an astronaut, putting  the lawyers within striking distance of an absolute majority . No other profession approaches this 43.5% plurality, and under quorum rules only lawyers can construe, for they wrote them themselves, it usually constitutes a de facto majority.

Science has  a fierce anthropological identity, and like the law, a pecking order of its own. Lawyers did not invent Physics Envy --ask around academe and you will find any geologist worth his salt considers himself the equal of any 10 of his colleagues, and each of them will assert  that any oilfield hand is twice as good as a physics whiz, for without geophysics, physicists wouldn't have a planet to stand on.

Physicists in turn sniff that they are universally acknowledged to be worth 11 chemists each, for such was the ratio in the Manhattan Project. This cuts no mustard with biologists, who 

are quick to point out that the Manhattan project failed miserably in its goal of exterminating life on earth because chemists and physicists do not know bupkes about life, which is the province of the Intelligent Design movement. Since the ID movement is a legal construct, its being really wrong persuades the biologists that-even in their present, only mildly evolved form-they are each worth 20 lawyers, maybe more.

"Nonsense", say the chemists, "We've done the math !"  Since other professionals are constituted entirely out of chemicals,chemists think themselves to be conservatively two to six orders of magnitude better than the rest, at standard temperature and pressure.

In sum, the eight scientists in Congress have the 234 lawyers so completely outnumbered that only an engineer could exactly reckon the size of sciences' occult Congressional majority Fortunately for the lawyers, there are no engineers whatever in the House,so the legislative life of the nation is not threatened by that contingency

Yet it is one of America's glories that while immigrants cannot aspire to the White House, they are at liberty to run for Congress, and scores have been elected and will continue to be. Since our nation remains the world's greatest magnet for engineering talent, the strange dearth of engineers in the corridors of power may soon be remedied--China alone sends thousands of engineers to our shores each year, for despite its astonishing economy, something makes the best and the brightest there  flee in droves-and it certainly isn't the growing imperial power of the Chinese Bar Association.

All nine members of the neo-Politburo running the People's Republic are engineers, just like Herbert Hoover. The Great Engineer's road to the White House ran through mine management in China Were he still in power, he would note the profound difference between Mao's retromingent Great Leap forward and what Beijung's new entrepreneurial technocrats have in mind. Being engineers, they actually have an energy policy.

Be very afraid, lawyers-these are not Jimmy Carter retreads. They combine thermodynamic literacy and a grasp of energy economics with the Best Practices sensibility of the MBAs that they are as well. Take light bulbs-they have the bright idea that chucking incandescent bulbs into the dustbin of technology can save a bundle of money, and free even more for capital investment. So efficient are light-emitting diodes that replacing one third of all the conventional bulbs in China  would slash hydropower demand and render another $24,000,000,000 Yangtze River Dam superfluous, saving a cool billion a year in power bills and a vast acreage of farmland from ending up like New Orleans.

So farewell Adam Smith: The engineering mandarins have the mandate of Heaven to invest the peoples pension funds in say, "The East Is Red Candlepower Corporation" and dictate to the proletariat that they screw in what they are told.  Hoover himself saw this coming , explaining his professions political eclipse in a free society thus : "The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open...He cannot bury his mistakes like the doctors, he cannot argue them into thin air like the lawyers... He cannot, like the politicians , screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope the people forget ...If his works do not work , he is damned."

So many of Hoover's works worked so well  that FDR  had no recourse but to change the course of the Colorado by building a damned big dam and naming it  in Hoover's honor.

It's still standing ,  That it has endured  the West's largest  river roaring  through it  for three generations--and uncountable gigawatt hours--suggests a political moral- the Republic's survival  may  well depend on reinforcing Congress by electing without delay  two engineering geologists , a prospector , and a mule well versed in the art and science of  filibustering.