Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
The reader may recall that, when they took civics in high school, our Constitution had set up a separation of powers in government. Designed to prevent tyranny, patterned on the Roman Republic, and honed by the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, this separation was intended to prevent any one official from acquiring the power to unconstitutionally impose
his will upon a free people.
Our government has three levels: municipal and county, state, and Federal. Each has differing responsibilities. For example, the policing powers that enforce most laws are reserved for the states and are not the province of the Federal government. Giving law enforcement to the various states is also (like almost everything else in our Constitution) intended to avert tyranny by strictly limiting those occasions when the Federal government prosecutes its own citizens.
Consider how far we have strayed from this in practice over the past century and more.
The Federal government itself is divided into three branches. In simplest terms, the Legislative Branch (Congress) makes the laws and the Executive Branch (the President) enforces the laws while the Judicial Branch (the Federal Courts) interprets the meaning of the laws. Nothing significant can be done by any one branch without the cooperation of the other two branches.
All of this was done because our Founding Fathers were utterly suspicious of the propensity of governments to prey upon their own citizens. Each Founder was a traitor to his rightful King and Empire because he felt called to defend Enlightenment principles of inalienable human rights and popular sovereignty, even against his own rulers.
Our Founders knew bone-deep the ever-present danger that even the most well-intentioned government poses to any concept of liberty. No government ever has been comfortable voluntarily acknowledging finite limits to the scope of its own authority. By their very natures, governments resist recognizing that anything is transcendent or beyond their purview.
Add this to the ubiquitous tendency of government intrusion to constantly expand. Left unchecked, government dictates tend to eventually encompass all forms of citizen choice. Governments are hungry to consume the liberties of its citizens in the name of protecting them, even from themselves. At best, government is like fire, steam power, guns, or nuclear fission. Its power can, when controlled, improve life. Uncontrolled, it constitutes a clear and present danger to every citizen.
Unfortunately, the civics curriculum on the separation of powers has since been updated. Today, there is in effect a fourth branch of Federal rule with powers at least as potent as any of the three Constitutional branches. The permanent Federal bureaucracy, what is often termed the Administrative State or the Deep State, now commands a vast scope of control over the American people.
Ostensibly a part of the Executive Branch, Federal bureaucracies have taken on a permanency and opacity that renders them largely invulnerable to outside pressure. These structures are Byzantine, with official organizational charts bearing little resemblance to the actuality of informal influence.
Staffed by those who score highest on Civil Service Exams and augmented by experts from academe, industry, law enforcement, and the military, Federal agencies attract very ambitious, well educated, and hard-working employees. With good reason, these individuals take pride in their professional accomplishments and in the grave responsibilities with which they are entrusted. Most of the time, these American Apparatchiks give good service to our Republic.
Unfortunately, Shakespeare was right about absolute power corrupting absolutely. Because these agencies operate with increasingly less effective oversight by political appointees appointed by successive Presidential administrations, the permanent bureaucracy itself has taken on an independent life of its own.
Our Administrative State now constitutes an un-elected and un-Constitutional regulatory authority that wields broad powers with no accountability to the people through their elected representatives.
By their cooperation or obstruction, this Federal bureaucracy can make or break the ambitions of Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and Congressmen. Even state officials such as Governors and municipal officials such as Mayors are vulnerable to the prejudices of Federal bureaucrats.
Colluding with their allies in the media, academe, K-12 education, labor unions, the Courts, law enforcement, the military, and Woke corporations, the permanent bureaucracy serves itself. Like a parasite or cancer, Federal Agencies have become ends unto themselves rather than means to ensure the liberty and security of US citizens.
It is this unaccountable Leviathan that is fighting Trump with every fiber of its being. These high achievers have come to see themselves as a natural aristocracy who have every right to rule over the rest of us, for our own good. Either citizens will break the power of this Deep State, or we will abandon any pretense that we still rule ourselves.
Who rules? It cannot continue to be both the people and the bureaucracy. It must either be us or them! Fellow citizens, join me in striving so the answer might be us.
