The insubordination of the administrative state to Trump's orders

 Andrea Widburg:

...

Significantly, the president is the end of the line for whether material is classified or not.  If he says it's not, then it isn't.  With that declassification order in place, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a message to the Department of Justice asking the DOJ to release the documents as expeditiously as possible:

"I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied," Meadows wrote in the memo.

As Meadows's memo makes clear, the DOJ did not have the authority to refuse to release the documents.  Its authority was limited to redacting that material that would improperly violate specific individuals' privacy.  Instead, the DOJ did nothing at all.

Just The News discovered this deliberate inaction when it went to the National Archives seeking the binder in question.  Instead, it learned from the National Archives that the binder never arrived, remaining instead in the DOJ's hands.

When Just The News interviewed Meadows, he said he wasn't surprised at all because the administrative state — which was supposed to report to the president — instead constantly thwarted him:

What would happen is he would have a directive, and then we would see, as people were leaving the Oval Office, you know, they were nodding compliance in the Oval Office, and the minute they go out, they said, "Well, we're not going to do that" or "We're going to find all the reasons not to do it." So I found that very often while I served as chief of staff, but also found that as a member of Congress, that many times we would go in and the president was all in on a transparency issue, only to find that many, whether they be at a particular agency or the Pentagon, they started pushing back.

In other words, presidents come and go, but the Swamp is forever — and it will report only to Democrat administrations.

...

I am reminded of President Truman's statement after the election of Gen. Eisenhower was elected,  "I can't wait for that General to get in here and give an order and nothing happens."  Presidents come and go, but the administrative state goes on its merry way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more