Talk of a coup in American government reflects an all too real crisis, but it’s not the singular incident that gets all the publicity.
Unlike the hyperbole centered around the one-day January 6 riot, a true crisis has been in the making for decades. Understanding the threat of unelected bureaucrats and radical appointees hijacking the real power of the national government, and the steps taken to further the control of relatively unaccountable individuals explains much of the vicious fighting that has devastated America politics over the past six years.
In terms of impact on the daily lives of the citizenry, Congress, the President and the Supreme Court combined all play second fiddle to the bureaucracy.
Writing for Mises.org, Gary Galles notes that “Congress has increasingly abdicated its lawmaking responsibility, delegating its power through vague laws and mandates to executive agencies, which then impose and enforce the actual regulations that legally bind Americans.”
According to the Brookings Institute and the historian Ryan Gingeras, “The concept of the deep state is used to explain why and how agents employed by the state execute policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.”
The real reason why so many powerful forces launched unprecedented attacks on the 45th President was inadvertently revealed during testimony at an impeachment hearing. The subtext of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman’s remarks was that Trump was unfit to be President because he refused to be ordered about by bureaucrats.
Donald Trump, even before announcing his presidential bid, loudly complained about this unconstitutional reality. In doing so, he ignited the fierce and unrelenting enmity of the most powerful segment of the Washington establishment. To deflate the power of the bureaucrats who pushed radical agendas through their regulatory authority, the Trump Administration initiated a policy of abolishing two regulations for every new one implemented, as mandated by Executive order 13771.
In a Government Executive article, Charles Clark reported that “a month after President Trump took the oath of office, his chief strategist offered a controversial description of what Americans, including the 2 million career civil servants Trump now leads in the executive branch, could expect from the new president: Every day would be a battle for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ said Stephen Bannon.”
Susan Milligan, writing in U.S. News back in 2019 described the former Presidents’ anti-Deep State perspective and the price he paid for it. “President Donald Trump has never been shy about expressing his contempt for career government workers … after many months of investigations, subpoenas and reports of alleged Trump offenses, it is these same career officials who are poised to provide the defining evidence in the impeachment case against Trump…Trump has seen pushback from career public servants since the start of his term.”
Precisely the opposite is true of Joe Biden. Whether due to personal incapacity or through choice, it is clear that the individual elected in 2020 is completely under the influence of the leftist Washington professionals that now rule the D.C. roost. It is difficult to see much of the personality and political inclinations of Biden, who many had seen as a moderate, in the extreme progressive policies of those bureaucrats and staffers who clearly and solidly rule his Administration.
The powerbroker lobbyists, bureaucrats, and Wall Street donors who profit from the cheap labor provided by an open southern border, generous government “green” grants, and other distributions from the public treasury have what they always sought: a chief executive totally under their control. The extreme progressive ideologues who have slowly built careers in Washington agencies have their chance to implement agendas that no candidate for elective office could both advocate and win.
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