I long ago came to the conclusion that the alphabet agencies populating the federal government are unconstitutional and should be defunded, decommissioned, razed and salted over — permanently abolished, never to be formed again. The federal government was supposed to be small with powers restricted to those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.
Jefferson also felt that the central government should be “rigorously frugal and simple.” As president he reduced the size and scope of the federal government by ending internal taxes, reducing the size of the army and navy, and paying off the government’s debt. Limiting the federal government flowed from his strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Under that system of a separation of powers each branch of the Federal Government was expected to protect its own Constitutional powers such that no single branch accrued power it was not allocated by the Constitution. The Founders understood that individuals were free in direct proportion to each branch of the Federal Government staying strictly within its own bounds, and the most important lane was the legislative lane; a narrow road of strictly enumerated powers written by a Congress consisted of duly elected representatives; with the House of Representatives the body most regularly elected, and with special powers over the origination of revenue bills in the driver’s seat.
But today many legislative and budget powers have been ceded to Presidents and the executive branch through statutes delegating legislative responsibility to Federal regulatory agencies composed of unelected people; and statutes mandating automatic and increased spending on certain programs administered by the executive branch.
That bolded text is the crux of the issue: Congress has delegated its own authority to unelected bureaucracies which issue regulations and rules that have the practical effect of law. Constitutionally, however, only Congress has the power to make law — it’s the legislative branch of the government, for Pete’s sake! — and only the House has the ability to appropriate funds, the lifeblood of these agencies and extra-constitutional organizations.
Yet the pressures of keeping a seat in the House or the Senate means that outsourcing their responsibility to unelected bureaucrats is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the onerous administrative state that Americans suffer under.
At first Congress had the upper hand; Congress had been creating the bureaucracy to carry out its wishes. But the more Congress gave away its powers in the form of broad regulatory authority, the more bureaucrats effectively became the lawmakers. The rise of the new imperial Presidency, and it should be shocking but no surprise, as Congress has expanded the bureaucracy creating programs, delegating authority, neglecting budgeting; the executive has attained unprecedented levels of authority. Our executives can command the bureaucracy to implement new procedures and policies without the cooperation of Congress by abusing executive discretion, by exploiting the vagaries of poorly written laws, and now by willfully neglecting and disregarding the laws which indeed are clear.
In his testimony before the 2016 Task Force for Executive Overreach Judiciary Committee (in the same linked document), Dr. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College, wrote:
This transfer of lawmaking power away from Congress to an oligarchy of unelected experts who rule through executive decree and judicial edict over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, under the guise of merely implementing the technical details of law, constitutes nothing less than a revolution against our constitutional order. The significance of this revolution cannot be overstated. It threatens to undo the development of the rule of law and constitutional government, the most significant and influential accomplishment of the long history of human liberty.
This revolution has created an increasingly unbalanced structural relationship between an ever more powerful, aggressive and bureaucratic executive branch and a weakening legislative branch unwilling to exercise its atrophied constitutional muscles to check the executive or rein in a metastasizing bureaucracy. If the executive-bureaucratic rule now threatening to overwhelm American society becomes the undisputed norm — accepted not only among the academic and political elites, but also by the American people, as the defining characteristic of the modern state — it could well mark the end of our great experiment in self-government.
Against that background, Michael Walsh’s latest column takes on more urgency.
Bureaucratic parasitism has only accelerated since start of the Nixon administration … as demands for D.C. to “do something” about pretty much everything grew and grew. Having won the war in Europe with Soviet and British help, and defeated the Japanese Empire practically by themselves, Americans felt there was no task too big to tackle. On Nixon’s watch —Tricky Dick’s fatal flaw, like Donald Trump’s, was the fool’s errand of trying to get his enemies (who detested him) to like him—the regulatory agencies were summoned into being, dark golems bent on destroying the Constitution in the guise of trying to Save the Earth.
One of the first up was the Environmental Protection Agency, the demon spawn of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandated (what an ugly word for a democracy to employ) “environmental impact” statements for future federal projects. Nixon put teeth in the law with the creation by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency at the end of that same year. Then the unelected bureaucrats took over, and turned what had been sold as benign into a ravenous, uncontrollable, punitive beast. And now here we are:
The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.
It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change.
Death by a thousand cuts as the administrative state piles rule upon rule on top of our backs. Today’s Washington D.C. is a sinister, grotesque Gordian knot not unlike a cancerous tumor that has wrapped itself around the brain stem of its victim. Not doing anything will allow it to eventually kill any semblance of representative government — something I believe we are fast approaching.
Yet the alternative is an aggressive, unsparing treatment that cuts it out before it can do any more damage, and one of those agencies — the DOJ — has already demonized anyone who dares raise an objection to the administrative state as a “domestic terrorist.”
This is why I’ve warned that we’re heading for a significant conflict that can only be described as a civil war. That’s the trajectory we’re on, which is underscored by the literal movement of Americans out of blue zones across the fruited plain.
What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.
Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,562,937 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)
More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.
Some highlights:
- Of the 555 counties Biden won, 335 (or 61%) lost population due to internal migration, our analysis found. Of the 2,589 counties that Trump won, 1,675 (or 65%) gained population.
- Two Biden-voting counties that lost the most from net migration were Los Angeles County, which was down 363,760, and Cook County, Illinois, down 200,718. While many of the blue counties that lost population were urbanized, the exodus was widespread and nationwide, including many far more sparsely populated liberal areas.
- In contrast, the biggest loss in any red county was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, down just 18,470.
- In 13 states that had a net loss of population, red counties nevertheless showed gains. In California, which saw a massive net outflow of 871,127 people in just the past two years, counties that backed Trump had a net gain of 8,412. New Jersey suffered a loss of 107,749 over the past two years, but counties in the Garden State that voted for Trump gained 22,507. Michigan lost 43,188 overall, but its red counties had a net gain of 28,091.
- On the other hand, blue counties lost population in states that saw overall gains. For example, Florida had a net gain of 622,476 over the past two years. But counties that backed Biden nevertheless lost 3,374. Georgia had a large gain of 128,089, but blue counties still had a net loss of 28,178. Tennessee saw an increase of 146,403 people, but counties that voted for Biden saw a decline of 37,306.
Once the majority of moves have been completed, the red and blue state boundaries will harden and then there won’t be anywhere else to run to. As the federal government favors blue states over red, red states will either file for divorce or have to fight to leave the union.
We’re in for a long slog.