Trump plan deals with administrative state

 I&I:

It didn’t take long for a New York Times article about Donald Trump’s plans to “increase presidential power in 2025” for the left to suffer yet another mental breakdown, rushing on the air and in print to call the news “terrifying,” “frightening,” “menacing,” “incredibly alarming.” And, of course, “fascist,” or as a University of North Carolina professor took to the Atlantic to declare, “a new kind of fascism.”

What has the left grasping for the Xanax again? Here are the horrifying facts as reported by the Times:

Trump – as well as other Republicans running for office – hope to “increase the president’s authority” over the executive branch of government, including “independent” federal agencies.

“He wants to revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like,” the Times reports. “He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda.”

As the Times puts it: “The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state.”

To constitutional scholars such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this is “a plan to radically change the form of governance that we have in the United States. So as to concentrate all the power of the government in the hands of a single leader.”

Maddow and others throwing temper tantrums might try reading the Constitution one day. Right there, in Article II, Section 1, it says “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

The Constitution also says that there are two other branches of government designed to check executive authority, known as Congress and the Supreme Court.

What really freaks the left out isn’t that Trump and many other conservatives want greater control over the executive branch, it’s that they are finally getting serious about taking on the fourth branch of government.

If you thought there were only three branches, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening over recent decades. The growth of “independent” federal agencies that aren’t accountable to Congress or the White House. The explosion of regulations from unelected bureaucrats buried in various federal agencies, whose dictates, once written, often can’t be challenged in court. And the phalanx of civil service protections in place for those who actively try to undermine the chief executive or are just plain incompetent.
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Reigning in the administrative state and making it subject to the control of the three constitutional branches of government does not sound that scary to me.