Decoding the Tyranny of the Administrative State

American Thinker ^ | 5 Jam, 2022 | John Dale Dunn

[MtnClimber]

The legislative and judicial powers and authority exercised by agencies and officials of the executive branch are clearly a usurpation of the powers of the other branches -- and clearly illegal and unconstitutional.

Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom, by Philip Hamburger, 336 pp Hardcover $35 Kindle $33.25, ISBN-13 ‏‎ 978-0674258235, Harvard University Press, 2021.

Professor of Law Philip Hamburger of Columbia University has been campaigning for years to measure, define and condemn the growth of a powerful administrative state in America.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla rang the alarm about the excesses of centralized oligarchic statism and an army of unelected bureaucrats eating away at liberty for citizens under the constitution in his essay, "Scientific Pretense and Democracy," followed on by another wellreceived 2010 essay "The Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution," about the growth of an unelected totalitarian ruling class, whose influence and power are derived from "expertise" that allowed them to exert power over and intimidate the citizenry as the self-anointed oligarchy.

Professor Hamburger, Friedman Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia, caught my attention with a short monographic book, The Administrative Threat, that summarized the points of his erudite 650-page 2014 book, Is the Administrative State Unlawful? The short book is a great summary but the long book is magisterial and explains why the political geniuses of the American Founding wrote a Constitution that intentionally hobbled the power of the executive branch and created competing branches to distribute power and prevent tyrannical grasping of power by any branch, along with a federal plan to distribute power to the states.

[MtnClimber]

The sociopaths seem to gravitate to government. Most people don’t like the way sociopaths treat them. I would like to see the day when government workers get treated the same way by society. They would need to wear some identifying mark like maybe a yellow star.

[SauronOfMordor]

What defines the “Administrative State” is the control by long-term bureaucrats over the executive branch. The Deep State is the collection of bureaucrats who use their power to benefit themselves and their friends. Part of it is the “revolving door”, where officials retire from a department (leaving behind hand picked cronies) and go on to well paying positions in the companies they used to regulate.

People talk about “term limits” for elected officials. What we really need is the ability to clean out the bureaucracy. We need to empower new administrations to fire and replace Deep State people. We need to terminate civil service protections for administrators.

[livius]

I think you have summed up the problem. The executive essentially becomes the implementation and enforcement arm of the Deep State bureaucracy.

Look at how the embedded Deep State “health bureaucracy,” unchanged for decades and even having been wrong for decades, took over the Presidency. And this happened under Trump, even though he had railed against the Swamp and the Deep State for year.

But he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to them, and no executive can be because there’s simply no way of getting rid of them as things are now.

[AndyJackson]

This all is under the pretense that the bureaucracy is made up of experts who know better than the citizenry possibly can. This is an outrageous lie and hopefully Chevron deference will be overturned on the obvious stupidity of this presumption.

Covid shows that the folks controlling the bureaucracy are morons. Whatever talents Fauci might have had earlier in his life [I concede nothing here BTW], he is clearly gone over to the dark side. Hubris and pomposity is strong in that one.