It seems like every four years, I have to repeat myself. If so, it is because every four years, people resurrect the same tired zombie arguments. Camille Paglia argues that she won’t vote for Hillary because she’s too corrupt and her positions are too poll tested — and the election will be too ugly! It’s not always the same people, but it’s always the same arguments. Go ahead and vote for Bernie in the general election, says Brogan Morris. Hillary Clinton is Dick Morris says HA Goodman (some of the people repeating the arguments may be less than genuine — Mr. Goodman argued that he’d vote for Rand Paul before Hillary).

The argument always boils down to the same basic nonsense — there’s no true difference between Democrats and Republicans. I have been able to vote since 1992, and Ross Perot’s supporters said it. Ralph Nader’s supporters said it — not just in 2000, but again in 2004, when you’d think it would ring hollow. And, in 2008, a few Hillary supporters, and a few other Obama supporters, said it.

It is just not true. It can only seem true if you don’t care to look very closely at the system we have in place here in the United States.

Part of the problem might stem from a misperception about what the President does — thinking that he or she has much more power to write and pass laws than actually exists. Hillary isn’t going to write new banking laws to regulate Wall Street. Bernie isn’t going to make college free. I'll let a song elucidate this point. The President’s power to set the agenda, or use the bully pulpit, is surprisingly weak.

And, part of the problem, ironically, is not seeing where the President is, actually, strong.

You sort of know this. You learned it in elementary school. You can recite it, like you recite the pledge of allegiance. Branches of government. How many are there? Three. And they are? The legislative, executive and judiciary.

But, you don’t really know what that means, sort of like you don’t really think about what the pledge means. The President is the executive branch. He or she administers the laws. But, what does that really mean?

2.8 million people.

That’s the bureaucracy. 2.8 million government employees working hard to make sure the laws of the country are “executed” properly. That means figuring out what Congress meant when they gave power to an agency. It means figuring out the rules that will protect Americans best within those powers that an agency got from Congress. Did Congress mean carbon dioxide when they wrote the Clean Air Act? Is it an “air pollutant?” And, if they did, how do we regulate carbon dioxide? These aren't idle questions, they're before the Supreme Court now.

The President doesn’t actually control those agencies, those 2.8 million people. What the President does, though, is hire thousands of people to head up those agencies. 800 people who require congressional approval, and another 2,200 that don’t. He or she hires these people and, basically, lets them loose to run the agencies they’re in charge of. After appointing them, the President’s direct control over those agencies drop significantly. They can remove them, but that rarely happens.

Do you know 3,000 people? 3,000 people you know well enough to trust to run, or assist in the running, of a large federal agency? I don’t. Hillary Clinton doesn’t. No one does. So, they work with the “establishment.” Legislators who have ideas and agendas. Plus, there are think tanks on both sides of the aisle who train subject matter experts. You can find think tanks on the far, far left and the near left, the far, far, right, and the near right. So, Hillary Clinton will pull from the left side of the aisle — Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute and other groups of left-leaning thinkers. Bernie will, too, though there might be some differences in which particular groups end up with more influence within their administration. And these are good reasons to choose one Democrat over another.

But, a Republican administration will be pulling from groups like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and ALEC. Taking advice from legislators who think global warming is a Chinese hoax!

Let’s take a look at some of the things Heritage is talking about these days. Let's see. Yesterday, they published a report saying we should shut down the USDA’s Rural Housing service. A few days before that they talked glowingly about the Little Sisters of the Poor case against ObamaCare. Want religious institutions making your reproductive policy? Get Heritage Foundation folks right on that. Oh. Ooh. A report on having a free-market approach to nuclear waste! Absolutely. Yeah. That sounds like a good idea!

The Cato Institute thinks we can solve gun violence with youth curfews. That we should privatize air traffic control. That ObamaCare is an abject failure.

So, when you’re thinking of voting for a President, you’re voting not just for the person — Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Cruz — but the entire apparatus that stands behind them.

Let’s take that last Cato Institute point as a pivot to the next couple of areas I want to talk about — the judiciary.

Who are Cato’s subject matter experts on ObamaCare? Two Michaels — Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner. That first guy, Michael Cannon, has been a one-man machine of “creative” legal arguments against ObamaCare. He basically invented the legal argument that the government couldn’t give subsidies to states that hadn’t built their own exchange. If it had been about any other law, it would have been facially absurd! It was a hyper-literal reading of a single line in a 2,000-page law, that had to ignore every other line of that law. But, because it was about ObamaCare, it caught the eye of conservative jurists and, even, four conservative Supreme Court justices. Including, by the way, Scalia.

But, for every Michael Cannon, there’s a liberal counterpart. We didn’t get school desegregation through a President. We got it through a legal case brought by the NAACP. We didn’t get interracial marriage through a President. We got it through a legal case brought by the ACLU. We didn’t get gay marriage through a President. We got it through cases brought by Lambda Legal, GLAD, and Freedom to Marry. The left-leaning think tanks and the left-leaning legal advocacy groups don’t stop working if we have a Democrat in the White House. They don’t stop working if we have a Republican in the White House. They don’t stop working if the President is more to the center, like Hillary, or more to the left, like Bernie.

But, these groups can either be fighting a head-wind, with a Republican administration, or they can have the wind at their backs, with a Democratic administration. These groups can be fighting bad regulations from a Republican administration, or working with a Democratic administration to shape good regulations. They can fight to overturn old, injurious precedents with the weight of the Federal Government against them, having the Department of Justice fighting them every step of the way, or for them, filing briefs arguing why the Feds no longer support the old ways. On the flip-side, the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation won’t stop fighting ObamaCare, fighting to gut gun control laws, to make it harder and harder to sue corporations, and we can choose to put the Feds on their side, or against them.

I look across the landscape of left-leaning, progressive, center-left think tanks and legal advocacy groups, legislators and interest groups and while I don’t agree with each of them 100%, there is not a one that I would trade for their equivalent on the other side.

And, now, lastly, the courts. Of course, the Supreme Court is important. Perhaps more important than any time in the past. But, I’m not going to lie to you. There are only 9 justices on the Supreme Court. They are, at a minimum, at the high end of middle-aged. There probably won’t be an election, ever, where the Supreme Court won’t be important, where we can just say, “Go ahead and let the Republicans have this election.” But, as important as it was to have Obama, who has appointed 2 excellent justices, it is especially important this time because we know there is an actual opening.

Usually, when we get to this point, the “they’re all the same” people throw up their hands and say, “Don’t tell me about the Supreme Court, you do that every time.” Sorry. We have to talk about it. The Supreme Court is, let’s face it, a teeny-tiny legislative body. They rewrite the laws. Congress can say you have the right to bring a class action, and five conservative Supreme Court Justices can say, we'd rather you couldn't. Those five justices can force you to accept arbitration in a far-away state. They can reinterpret the rules governing court rooms to make it almost impossible to sue financial firms. Or, make it much more difficult to sue anyone! And, on and on. This 5-man legislature has been responsible for much of the nation’s move to a more corporation-friendly place. Oh, and they’ve done their best to protect a Republican majority. 5-4 majorities have protected partisan redistricting, voter id laws, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and, oh yeah, gave us President Bush!

Name an issue where you think the country has gotten worse in the past 40 years, and I can probably point to a long line of 5-4 decisions from the conservative Supreme Court that has assisted Republicans in getting there or prevented Democrats from moving us away.

How about we talk about some other judges, now? Well, the Supreme Court is important, but so is the rest of the Federal Judiciary. Most cases won’t make it to the Supreme Court — they only take 70-80 of the 7,000 or so appeals they get, and most cases don’t even get to the point where they can be appealed. All Federal Judges (that I’m going to talk about here, anyway) are appointed by the President, and serve for life. And appeals court judges are generally chosen from the lower Federal Courts. As of a couple of years ago, we had just achieved about a 50/50 split in appeals courts and the lower district courts. The oldest, big, cohort of judges in appeals courts are Reagan/Bush judges — they represent 15% of the appeals courts, and 10% of the district court judges. We could go from 51.9% of the appellate judges and 50.9% of the circuit judges to something approaching a real majority! A real majority of Democratically-appointed judges protecting our civil rights, protecting our legislative advances, and trying to roll back the oppressive decisions that make our lives more difficult.

I could probably write for hours and hours about the differences between the two parties, and how I trust the Democrats and the Democratic establishment infinitely more than I would ever trust the Republican-opposites, but I think this diary is long enough. So, I’ll end this way. The two parties are not the same. If Bernie wins the nomination, I’ll vote for him in a heartbeat. If Hillary wins, I hope people will do the same. You are voting for the President, but also for the entire shape of our government, and for decades to come!