Yes! The national bishops’ conferences have dragged down and silenced the good bishops and promoted everything from mediocrity to heresy (not to mention the “culture of silence” regarding clerical crimes) since their inception. They were promoted heavily post-Vatican II because it was obviously the way to crush those individual bishops who disagreed with the zeitgeist.
The bishop is the teacher of his diocese, but the national conferences deprived him of all his authority and instead of letting him be responsible for his teaching, sent out garbage from their headquarters (dealing with nuclear war, say, instead of birth control).
They have lost some of their power, but not much. My bishop gave some really good anti-Obama, anti-Dem talks (not saying the words, of course, but we all knew who we were not supposed to vote for because of their anti-life, anti-Church policies) and then the USCCB sent out a video to “instruct” the parishes throughout the country which made it sound as if voting for the baby-killer was fine if you decided his “social justice” (i.e., leftwing distributionist) policies were better. So in other words, they just cut the legs out from individual bishops who had taken a considerable risk.
Bishop humanists know all they have to do is get socialism in place and then their problems with social conservatives and all their “hangups” about sin and the God they beleive in within the church is “out of their hands” and solved by Marxists to their secret liking. When they support humanist socialism, this is what they are doing. It has worked to kill Christianity in Europe. They want to do it here.