We have lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old functions. But in fact, a new kind of government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an evolution but a usurpation.
From a longish post on how the Progressives have subverted the Constitutional philosophy of self-Government – I highly suggest that you all go read it. As you do so, consider the other half of “self-government” – the ability for each one of us how to conduct our own “Pursuit of Happiness” or self government – as in our own daily lives in making our own decisions of what is best for ourselves. Once again, I ask “Is there any area of your life in which Government has not already decided (and therefore, limited) what it is that you can choose for yourself? Emphasis mine:
What has now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect, Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president, who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded “nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as obsolete.
(See “It’s Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a modern country needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it, effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.
Modernity, Wilson thought, demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent, hyper-educated experts,
Sidenote: If anything has been proven these last eight years, the “experts” (this blog would hardly exist without pointing out that most aren’t any more expert or intelligent than ordinary citizens) aren’t and they certainly are not “non-partisan (e.g, Lois Lerner in the FEC and IRS).
applying the latest scientific, economic, and sociological knowledge to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too complex for self-governing free citizens to solve.
In other words, these self-assured incompetents are highly that Citizens are completely stupid. Now, some might be, but does that give Progressives the authority and right act on that misguided and highly condescending view of everyone else not drawing a government paycheck? After all, who is smart enough to be earning the incomes that pay the taxes that support these parasitical neo-aristocracies?
Accordingly, he got Congress to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.
And certainly Republicans have gone along with this and now either think this normal (so don’t rock the boat) or far more ignorant of what has happened than us. Or, too craven (re: Kelly Ayotte didn’t even go the the GOP Convention so as not to have political mud be anywhere near here) in keeping their seats. After all, what has Ayotte REALLY done to rein in Obama as she promised during her first campaign? She certainly VOTED for the budgets presented – which fully funded almost all of Obama’s programs that have caused the base such angst in his becoming a Unitary President.
But the Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary. Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought), as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
