I believe that what they're trying to say is this: keeping a government running requires more than just voting for whoever you think will do a decent job every year or two, because it, ultimately, doesn't matter what Hamilton, Locke, Madison, De Tocqueville and other influential philosophers of politics might have intended, because any system that is only checked once a year is a fragile system, prone to corruption. It requires constant maintenance, bug fixes, security updates, and independent reviews. It requires not only that every part of it has the light of day cast upon it, but that the people at every level actually look and act on what the light of day reveals.

Whether you or the framers like it or not, the united states is no longer a representative republic. The people being elected are not representing the people. They are representing corporations, private interests and foreign oligarchs who pay them to give them the sweet meats of the treasury and leaving the ovens untended, but continuing to shovel the coals of our taxes into the ovens, because then they can make their own pies. The US government as it stands is committed to deregulation, to abandonment of all duty, and that laissez-faire attitude is by design, not of the framers or the people, but by the design of the corpocratic interests that have captured the government, media, and every other facet of our lives, including even our private actions and thoughts through a paucity of data privacy.