To those of our readers who want to know why we keep writing about Governor Palin, check this out. It turns out that one of the Secret Service Agents cashiered for consorting with a prostitute at Colombia was once on Mrs. Palin’s security detail. And he posted on his Facebook page a picture of himself standing behind the Alaskan governor. “I was really checking her out, if you know what I mean,” the Washington Post quoted the ex-agent, David Randall Chaney, 48, as having written on Facebook. The Washington Post’s report was followed up on Fox News by Greta Van Susteren, to whom the alert Alaskan confessed she was, as the Washington Post put it, “disgusted that a Secret Service agent would make jokes about checking out her ‘backside.’” Then Mrs. Palin made one of those segues for which she is famous, suggesting that what they should be checking out in Washington is “Article One, Section Nine, Clause Seven” of the Constitution.

That’s why we keep writing about Mrs. Palin. Section nine of Article One of the Constitution is the section that lists the things the federal government can never do, and clause seven contains the famous phrasing about how “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” Mrs. Palin’s point was that the Obama administration has been rattling along without a budget, in violation — in her view and ours — of this most basic slab of American bedrock. What a retort to questions about how a government agent was “checking her out.” That instinct is why she is still at the center of the American political dialog, nearly four years after she lost her race for the presidency of the Senate.

It suggests she is connected to what we regard as one of the deepest tensions building up in our political system and the one that promises the most illuminating fireworks in the coming year. This is the tension between the executive branch and the Congress. We get glimpses of it here and there, and not only in respect of the budget battle. The Supreme Court has just ordered the judges who ride circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to rule on the question of whether Congress has the power to require the Secretary of State to issue to an American infant born at Jerusalem a passport saying he was born in Israel. Secretary of State Clinton has just gone ahead with disbursements of money to the Palestinian Arabs that had been put on hold in the House of Representatives by the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

If, as some predict, the Democrats keep the presidency but lose the Senate and fail to regain the House, we could see the contest between Congress and the executive become the central feature of our reform struggle. Within the past two generations, it has cut both ways. During the Reagan years, conservatives generally favored the presidency. But that was precisely because the presidency was in mature hands. Today we live in a time when the presidency is held by a less mature figure, and conservatives are more generally looking to leadership in the Congress. Our own hopes rest with the law that created both the president and the Congress, and no figure keeps referring to it more than Mrs. Palin. It has become her mantra. There are those who ridicule this idea. But we’d reply, “check it out.”