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Whodunit

Chris Bray nails it clean and tight.

Your Job Is to Push the Yes Button
the secretaries make the game clear

A gaggle of former Secretaries of the Treasury — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen — warn in the New York Times today that the President of the United States is interfering with the operations of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to “Our Democracy” are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy.

Five people who’ve served at the top levels of the federal government can’t produce one clear and reasonable premise between them. After a bunch of throat clearing, the fourth paragraph begins the actual attempt at an argument:

The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.

The administrative state is impartial, honest, accurate, and pure. “Civil servants” are good; political people are bad. But this is how Article II begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Our entire system of government is premised on the authority of people who, having been elected to office, are accountable to be the people of the country for their choices. A function of government that “has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants”: not present in the Constitution. Prove otherwise, if you’d like to try. Show me the authority of that “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants” in Article II, and tell me exactly where to find it.

Five former senior government officials, feeling themselves wonderfully virtuous, have casually upended the entire American system of government without noticing that they’ve done it. Dire warning: The President of the United States is acting like he’s in charge of the executive branch.

Shocking, innit? Matt Margolis has a meme which explains this strange phenomenon.

‘Nuff said.

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4 thoughts on “Whodunit

  1. The Administrative State exists without any Constitutional basis, and has, since its inception. It has subverted Constitutional process since then, and now strives to overtly overthrow Constitutional governance. It is the living embodiment of sedition, and it itself must be overthrown and abolished at all levels.

    “The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. The original New Dealers were aware, at least to some degree, that their vision of the national government’s proper role and structure could not be squared with the written Constitution: The Administrative Process, James Landis’s classic exposition of the New Deal model of administration, fairly drips with contempt for the idea of a limited national government subject to a formal, tripartite separation of powers. Faced with a choice between the administrative state and the Constitution, the architects of our modern government chose the administrative state, and their choice has stuck. … The United States Congress today effectively exercises general legislative powers, in contravention of the constitutional principle of limited powers. Moreover, Congress frequently delegates that general legislative authority to administrative agencies, in contravention of Article I. Furthermore, those agencies are not always subject to the direct control of the President, in contravention of Article II. In addition, those agencies sometimes exercise the judicial power, in contravention of Article III. Finally, those agencies typically concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial functions in the same institution, in simultaneous contravention of Articles I, II, and III. In short, the modern administrative state openly flouts almost every important structural precept of the American constitutional order.” The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Boston University School of Law. https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/does-congress-have-the-power-under

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  2. FAFO, trump fired the fema cfo today for sending that money to the NY hotels.

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