Power Over The Rules

Power over the rules is real power.  That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution -- the rules for writing the rules -- has even more power than Congress.  If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.

-- Donella Meadows (1941-2001), American environmental scientist, teacher and writer, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008), Part three: creating change – in systems and in our philosophy, page 158