The President Can Finally Be President
The story behind this ruling is remarkable and hardly understood at all by the public. Elites, however, fully understand, which is why the headlines in The New York Times are so full of panic on this. It means, essentially, the end times for the administrative state as we know it. If the elected president can actually control staffing and personnel of the executive branch, we have taken a major step back to the U.S. Constitution and republican forms of government that the Founders imagined.
The idea was to mitigate against the “spoils system” that was seen as corrupted by patronage and nepotism. In fact, the Pendleton Act got the proverbial nose of the camel under the tent of people’s government. It began the problem of rule by experts. It gradually removed the power of the president to make changes in government other than to add employees and programs. Over time, removing them became nearly impossible.
By the postwar period, presidents had lost the ability to manage the executive branch. They did not tell you that. They did not challenge it. It was just the way government worked. Presidents served for four years in hope of a second term, and none seriously questioned the system. The challenge of the job is enough to keep them busy. No one knew for certain what the Supreme Court would say, in any case.
Meanwhile, the U.S. system of government bore ever less relation to what you read in the U.S. Constitution. Congress had created a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus that it did not manage but over which the president had little to no authority either. It’s amazing that this happened with almost no debate about what such a beast does to checks and balances and the whole idea of democracy itself. The result was a permanent state within a state, mostly useful to industry and media.
Trump in his first term was utterly overwhelmed by bureaucratic creatures on all sides. He was simply astonished to discover that he could not fire people under his section of the organizational chart. He couldn’t believe it. Finally fed up, he fired the head of the FBI. All heck broke loose, and the bureaucratic army plotted its revenge. The COVID-19 policy response was certainly part of that, but there was much more besides.
In the last two weeks before the election, he issued an executive order that found a clever workaround. It redefined policy-based bureaucrats under a new category called Schedule F. It would allow him to terminate them. He was said to have lost the election, however, and the new presidential claimant promptly reversed the executive order after inauguration.
Consider this whole situation from the perspective of a businessman. Let’s say someone puts you in charge of the corner grocery store. You are the top manager, even the CEO. There are 50 employees and thousands of suppliers. You are told that you have total power except that you can only hire and fire three of them, no more. The rest have protected jobs. Do you think you would be taken seriously? No. Could you do your job? No chance. You would be a figurehead and nothing more. The employees could ignore you and work solely on protecting and padding their nests against your mandate.
But even though you are a totem, you are held responsible for everything that takes place. If profits go down, it’s your fault. If sales are pathetic, you are blamed. If everything breaks, you are responsible for fixing it. Meanwhile, you have 45 lazy employees who do nothing but plot your demise.
That’s pretty much where Trump was in his first term. Actually, it’s worse than that. That’s where every president has been since Woodrow Wilson.
No one has told you that. No presidential biography openly admits it. That’s because it’s too embarrassing. As a result, the rise of this permanent, impenetrable, even immortal state within a state has grown in size, scope, and power for at least 10 decades, without much of a challenge in court at all.
Everyone in government knows that the bureaucrats run everything. But strangely, there is no fourth branch of government in the U.S. Constitution. Nothing about this system is consistent with anything the Founders wrote and no governing documents.
The American revolutionaries did not fight a war to establish a permanent bureaucracy, but rather to overthrow one. The Declaration of Independence is absolutely clear that it is the right of a people to overthrow a government that does not serve them.
No one wants a violent revolution as such, which is precisely why we have elections. But those elections need to have meaning. The new president needs to be able to manage the executive branch, consistent with Article 2, Section 1. It has to be this way and no other. The idea of a permanent civil service is utterly inconsistent with every idea of free government that we have. Something had to change.
Trump is the first president since Andrew Jackson to take up the challenge of seriously governing the executive branch. Probably others have tried, such as John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon after him. Most just went along given the stakes and the fate of those who stood up to the bureaucracies before.
Trump had four years to think through his strategy. Finally, he decided to presume the powers and act on them, knowing full well that the courts would go bonkers and block him at every turn. He lawyered up and prepared all the appeals. He acted on them. In his estimation, it would consume most of the first year of his governance before the Supreme Court would act.
It was a huge gamble, but what else could the Supreme Court say? There is no fourth branch in the Constitution. Even if the “liberal” judges didn’t like it, they would have to rule according to law and precedent. They have done this now.
This decision clears the way not only for Trump, but also for every future president, finally to be president. This amounts to the most massive blow to the administrative state—and blow for human freedom generally in the United States and maybe around the world—in a century of misrule. This is the core of it. This is the beast that needed slaying. This is the whole struggle or, at least, the core of it. We finally have clarity.
It’s a great day for celebration, for if any president wants to make major changes in the future, it can happen. Now we know who is in charge. It is a new day. Democracy has been given another chance to prove itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment