From Son of Spengler, this observation that Administrative State (re: Bureaucracy) may now be the Republicans’ bane of existence even if they hold the House and Senate AND gain the Oval Office (emphasis mine):
In fact, Obama has not achieved his successes through formal, Constitutional means, but through executive agencies and the courts. Those democratically-unaccountable institutions are comprised of people who share Obama’s vision and have largely been happy to stretch the boundaries of their institutions’ power and the law. The only arena in which Obama has been obliged to persuade, cajole, or fire is defense; even there, a culture of deference to elected civilian authority has made Obama’s job fairly easy. Otherwise, he just rode the Federal Beast in the direction it already wanted to go. He has been able to spend his days golfing, while the media — a cadre of progressive activists — has been there to cheer him on.
A Republican president will not have it so easy. Bureaucrats outwait elected officials, then outwit them with organizational jiu-jitsu, foot-dragging, and press leaks. Firing clandestinely insubordinate civil servants is no easy matter. Meanwhile, courts suddenly become skeptics of executive power when the executive in question is a Republican, and of duly-passed legislation passed by Republican majorities. The media will not give any quarter. Before the next president can achieve anything on his or her agenda, the ascendant unelected governing institutions must be brought under control. Containment is not enough; only rollback will do.
The 1946 law that gave Federal agencies the power to essentially make their own law and ability to set their own fines was absolutely wrongheaded and philosophically inimical to the separation of powers laid out in the Constitution – and I think was the Congress’s starting moment of plunging into the abyss of being post-Constitutional. If you GIVE your power away, trust me, those that pick it up will use it. With Obamacare, with all of its “The Secretary (of HHS) shall…” may have ended that beginning – for under Obama, we have seen the most expansive, most intrusive, most expensive, and most Liberty suffocating actions by unelected, unaccountable but regulation pushing bureaucrats ever.
Son of Spengler has the right of it – the Party of Government (Socialist embracing Democrats who worship centralized Government) IS the Government – many conservatives prefer competition of the Marketplace than the limiting departmental life in the bowels of Government. As we have seen with Congressional inquiries into the IRS and Benghazi, the Executive Branch is just snotting all over them.
And you can blame it on the Republicans who hold the majorities:
- Have they held anyone in contempt AND DONE ANYTHING ABOUT IT to apply penalties?
- Have they withdrawn funding for offending agencies to make them feel the pain?
- Have they held brought charges AND FOLLOWED THEM UP?
Pretty much, no. Flapping their gums only is no way to govern. They complain that Obama has not punished our enemies – yet they refuse to do the same in their own “realm of war” and make no mistake, we are seeing an ideological war being waged in front of our eyes. Unfortunately, the Smart People in the DC Repub arena are not able to bring the fight – only the Failure Theater.
Gosh, how much better would our nation be if they just did one thing – do their actual jobs and jealously protect their power and privilege granted to them by the Constitution? Instead, their actions scream “Fusion Party Politics”, which I just call
Jr. Democrats
Don’t like the title? Change the lack of results we see. Simple, eh?
J. Christian Adams amplifies what the late Polish President Vaclav Havel wrote:
…To Havel, “post-totalitarian” was not a term relating to sequence. “Post-totalitarian” did not mean a government that arises after the evolution or collapse of a totalitarian structure of the sort we typically associate with singular omnipotent leaders. Instead, “post-totalitarian” to Havel described a massive, bureaucratic culture that controlled vast territory over people’s lives, the economy, and was not tolerant of deviation or dissent.
Havel’s distinction between “post-totalitarianism” and the more consuming and familiar forms of totalitarianism has serious implications for our discourse today. Americans, even conservatives, tend to skip over Havel’s post-totalitarian nightmares in the continuum between Scandinavian-style socialism and Hilter’s style of totalitarianism. We forget about a big bureaucratic leviathan that masks its truly evil nature. Reading “The Power of the Powerless,” you explore a post-totalitarian bureaucratic system that sucks out the soul in ways that a traditional totalitarian system does not.
For example, in the traditional totalitarian system of an outlaw regime, it is usually a small gang of heavily armed thugs who have seized control through the threat of extermination of enemies. The enemies sulk and cower until they finally act. In a post-totalitarian world, the culture becomes the regime and the regime becomes the culture. A massive legalistic bureaucratic state driven by ideology holds power and suffocates every corner of life with ideology, snuffing out all sparks of dissent not by violent intimidation, but by something more sustainable.
…In this post-totalitarian surrender, “one pays dearly for this low rent home, the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience and responsibility.”
…Havel described the post-totalitarian system as:
… thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government, the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class, the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation, depriving people of information is called making it available … and the arbitrary use of power is called observing the legal code.
What was down is up, what is outside is in, what was wrong is now right. Some call this a fundamental transformation. Havel calls it the culture of the lie. Whatever, it is the core of Marxism, to destroy and replace systems which place individual dignity as the highest value.
(H/T: Betsy’s Page)
