My Facebook timeline has become peppered with liberals and progressives in varying degrees of freakout mode, decrying whatever it is Trump is doing right now. Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, Russia, on and on the list goes. Some of them are sharing phone numbers for congresscritters and urging each other to call and ask for ... what?
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| Call your representatives all you want, you little swine. I'm going to rule by decree. |
Where was I? Oh yes, the irrelevancy of it all.
As the government has grown, the mechanisms for running the government through the passage of laws in Congress have broken down. Obamacare is a perfect example of this. When taking over such a huge portion of the economy, it's simply impossible to write a law, even in 1,000+ pages, that will cover all cases. In order to deal with this issue, the law gives the bureaucracy control. Mark Steyn summarized it quite well.
As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the Secretary "shall," another 200 to the Secretary "may," and 139 to the Secretary "determines." So the Secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack "shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities whatsoever they be." In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius' jurisdictional authority:That power didn't go away with King Barack. It stuck around and now it's in the hands of King Trump.
"The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance."
Executive orders are no big deal. They are what executives hand out in the daily job of executiving. Executive orders become a big deal when you hand the executive's underlings nearly unlimited power. Which we have done.
Charles Murray, in his book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, details just how untouchable the bureaucracy is. If you have a dispute with them over one of their regulations, you can take them to court.
The court, unfortunately, will be within their jurisdiction. You didn't think you were going to get a jury, did you? Ha! No, you have to go through layers regulatory review, performed by the agency you are fighting, before you can escape into the sunny uplands of the American legal system and spend a wad on lawyers trying to fight regulations on the order of tooth-level surveillance.
Circling back around to our main point, there is no purpose being served by calling your representatives when they have no power any more. This was the whole point of the socialist idiocy of the left, but they're mostly too dense to see it. They kept agitating for more and more power for the government, breaking most of the levers of control in Congress and now, gasp!, the Deplorables went out and voted in that unwashed pig, Donald Trump. So now all that power they cheerfully handed to the government is in the hands of sexist, racist, homophobes. Whoops!
The most fascinating thing to watch is how they're not learning the lesson, government governs best which governs least, but are actually wasting their time and energy marching and protesting and making phone calls. What a bunch of morons! The system is doing exactly what they wanted it to do. It's completely impervious to assaults, not just by greedy corporations and racist political organizations, but to lefty citizens as well!
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
As Jonah Goldberg might say, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh uproariously at the utter futility of their efforts.
So glad the R's have never behaved this way.
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Nothing to see here, move along.
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For as long as I've known your politics, you've agitated for more money and power for the government. Well, that has accumulated to the point that there are no longer any mechanisms by which our elected representatives can exercise reliable control over the leviathan we've created. Similarly, progressives have argued endlessly for a "living Constitution" under which justices can find anything they please. Now the white, homophobic bigots who cling to their guns and bibles voted in sufficient numbers to elect Trump and you're unhappy because you're getting exactly what you've asked for all along.
ReplyDeleteThe problem isn't with the voters or Trump or the Republicans or the Democrats, it's that the government is too big and trying to do too much. Of course, the R's are exploiting this for their own gain. That's what politicians do. If you don't want this to happen, you either need to put an end to democracy or you need to shrink the government down to a manageable size. There aren't any other options.
Very well said. And ain't it funny, all these brainiacs who can produce over a thousand pages of laws and regulations for obamacare, the EPA overseeing every puddle on every farm, the Education crowd controlling the schools and what can be taught and all the other bloated bureaucracies never stop to ask themselves how on earth the country ran itself sixty years ago without them. They really are pathetic, also insane.
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