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.
...

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. 

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