Unitary Government
Our government has become a traveling circus of failure, destruction, and suck.
There are too many "workarounds" for us to continue this way. The Constitution has been ignored for so long, nobody thinks twice about it. Too much unitary power has been ceded to the Executive Branch, which is basically the royalty of the Deep State.
Several years ago, during Bush II, the left was all about killing the 'Unitary President", alleging that the Executive had been taken too much power away from Congress - all the while Congress was simply giving it away to the agencies and departments.
The result has been the empowerment of the Deep State, commanded by any president willing to use it.
No matter what they say about Bush, there has never been another president in history with the willingness to use the Deep State the way Obama did to advance his agenda and as a weapon against a threatening candidate and who eventually became a duly elected, sitting president. Biden is just stumbling through with help from Obama's Deep State legacy guiding his feeble hands and mind.
Expediency and "too big to fail" have become the tool of tyrants. We have allowed too much power to be concentrated in too few hands.
I had pushed my anger down but the horrific show trial that is the J6 hearings came to primetime and the outright lying of the Biden administration has brought it back up. I am completely frustrated at how futile it seems to expect elected officials to control government in general (much less shrink it) and the Republican’s ability to do anything meaningful about it in specific. It is colossal cluster f*ck, a traveling circus of failure, destruction, and suck.
Karl Marx said that capital was “dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks”.
Substitute “government” for “capital” and it is a fitting description for the US federal government.
Why is it this way?
Mostly because the elected portion if our government is dwarfed in both population and real power by the administrative state, the entrenched bureaucracy that lives on regardless of which party wins elections.
Think of it in these terms – Americans elect 1 president and 1 vice president, 100 Senators and 435 Representatives to federal service on our behalf, that totals 537 elected officials. In 2015, the federal government employed 2.79 million civil servants, many in senior positions with greater regulatory and enforcement power than any branch of the elected government. A mid-level bureaucrat in the EPA has more direct power over the daily lives of regular citizens than any Congressional committee and most certainly any more than any elected individual in Congress.
Now add to those facts that there is a political movement in both parties that supports more government – the Democrats are 100% steeped in the progressivism of Wilson and FDR and even a significant percentage of the GOP are adherents of the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt – and you can see that there is a very small percentage of the elected government who want smaller government.
People want to term limit Congress to a few terms – let’s say five two-year terms in the House and two in the Senate. The President is already limited to two terms – so that’s ten, twelve and eight years respectively. The Office of Personnel Management (federal government agency) records the average seniority of a civilian federal worker at 13.7 years. Slightly over half have a undergraduate degree. There is also a category called the Senior Executive Service (SES) – people who serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees – where the average length of federal service is 23.4 years. The administrative state is filled with people who understand how to work the levers of Leviathan. Even without term limits, the elected branches of government are transient – the bureaucracy is forever.
Based on these facts, just who do you suppose truly runs government?
I have guesstimated that our elected officials have maybe, on a good day, control over 33% of the operation of the government Leviathan. It may be far less. There were three co-equal branches of government established by the U.S. Constitution, to combat the checks and balances provided in that document, a progressive movement started by the Constitution hating Woodrow Wilson, expanded by FDR and added to by every successive progressive official, created a powerful, unelected, unchecked fourth branch, the bureaucracy (often referred to as the administrative or deep state).
There is such a feeling of helplessness in America when it comes to dealing with the deep state. People have come to believe that nothing can be done about bad government, so they just accept it and just factor that in their daily lives. This is different from the old “boiling frog” analogy because in that scenario, the frog doesn’t realize he is getting poached. Americans do realize what is happening to them, they just don’t believe they can do anything about it, so a great percentage just vote for the progressive candidate from either party and hope to get their little slice of the pie.
Higher taxes – oh, well…
Wasteful programs that don’t work – that’s just the way government works, right?
Crappy elected officials – hey, politicians suck, what do you expect?
Lockdowns, mask, and vaccine mandates – just the price of “public health”, right?
Put that in the context of a system built by corrupt people to protect their corruption and it seems insurmountable. The system is resistant to incremental change – it laughs it off.
But that is how it has come to be redesigned – the Deep State is impervious to attack from elected officials. Thinking that elected officials opposed to it will be successful is like believing that putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound will heal the patient.
Hillary Clinton would have made it worse, perhaps not as bad as Biden has, but worse. Trump made some superficial impact, weighed down by the Deep State’s interference.
If we do not address the power of the Deep State fourth branch of government, Leviathan will continue to grow, and elections will have less and less meaning.
Changing government requires changing ALL of government and it appears the only way to change it is to rip it out by the roots as prescribed in the Declaration of Independence.
As a retired legislator (NM House of Representatives 2004-2010), I can say without hesitation that you are dead-on. Although I served at the State level, I can tell you that the legislature would have collapsed without the bureaucracy, most of which was left-leaning. Legislators come and go, but the people really running the show are those who have expertise at pulling the right strings. I ultimately resigned since the minority Republicans were only "permitted" so many wins. The Dems didn't want it to look TOO lopsided. Too your point though...I often wish Trump had done a better job of cleaning house in the various departments and appointing people who would give the agencies better balance. If I were queen, I'd move every agency head around (naturally they can't be fired) to positions where they can't cause too much trouble. I know...the impossible dream, but sometimes optimism overwhelms my sense of reality.
And Who is going to Bell the cat?
So you’re saying it IS hopeless. There Isn’t anything we can really do. And even a fiercely determined president made only a slight - and temporary - difference.
I honestly don’t know WHAT we can do, and think elections are already nothing but dog & pony shows.
All I know is that there is something terribly wrong with waking up every day, Dreading What our government going to Do To Us today, and having to spend so much of life’s energy in efforts to just mitigate the damage to lifestyle, independence, security and well being. This admin. has proved worse than nightmares, with the damage already done to a lifetime of careful planning, monumental effort, fiscal prudence, and personal responsibility. And we’ve only “served” 16 months of this 4-year term. What will remain ???