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Obama’s Success: It’s the Institutions, Stupid
Over the past few weeks and months, Obama has been winning. His administration has proved unstoppable on just about every item on its agenda, from environmental and energy regulation to illegal immigration to gay marriage to Obamacare. Indeed, the president recently acknowledged this obliquely, saying that gun control “has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied.” It’s difficult to find any other area where conservatives have held back the progressive tide. The next president will be hard-pressed to contain the damage to our economy, our international interests, and our liberty.
Two competing narratives dominate the 2016 GOP nomination contest. The first stresses competence and experience. Obama, this narrative goes, came to office as a community organizer with no real-world experience and little political experience. He surrounded himself with ignorant young hacks, and has stumbled from one mistake to another. Thus we need to nominate an experienced administrator with a proven record as an executive: no more first-term senators.
The second narrative is that despite his inexperience, Obama has achieved his goals. He surrounded himself with ideologues. His vision and his will were all it took. Experience, according to this narrative, is overrated. We need a candidate who can inspire.
What if both narratives are wrong?
In fact, Obama has not achieved his successes through formal, Constitutional means, but through executive agencies and the courts. Those democratically-unaccountable institutions are comprised of people who share Obama’s vision and have largely been happy to stretch the boundaries of their institutions’ power and the law. The only arena in which Obama has been obliged to persuade, cajole, or fire is defense; even there, a culture of deference to elected civilian authority has made Obama’s job fairly easy. Otherwise, he just rode the Federal Beast in the direction it already wanted to go. He has been able to spend his days golfing, while the media — a cadre of progressive activists — has been there to cheer him on.
A Republican president will not have it so easy. Bureaucrats outwait elected officials, then outwit them with organizational jiu-jitsu, foot-dragging, and press leaks. Firing clandestinely insubordinate civil servants is no easy matter. Meanwhile, courts suddenly become skeptics of executive power when the executive in question is a Republican, and of duly-passed legislation passed by Republican majorities. The media will not give any quarter. Before the next president can achieve anything on his or her agenda, the ascendant unelected governing institutions must be brought under control. Containment is not enough; only rollback will do.
This will require both competence and vision. Competence and vision such as we saw in the last president who was determined to roll back an evil empire. Do any of the current candidates have that combination? A few give me hope. But even in the best of circumstances, it will be a difficult and bloody battle. May God grant the Republican Party, and the United States, the wisdom to choose well — and the fortitude to stand for liberty.
Published in Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Elections, General, Guns, Law, Military, Politics
You can’t fire them, but you can de-fund the bureaucracy. Same thing. Can’t fire for something without cause, but if the Division of Interior Antelope Genitalia gets a 50% cut in funding, those genitalia and those jobs go buh-bye.
Now they might get absorbed somewhere else deep within Leviathan – but it is a start.
“The Opposition aren’t really the opposition . They are only the opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the opposition in residence.” – Rt. Hon. James George “Jim” Hacker, MP, KG, PC, BSc (Lond.), Hon. DCL (Oxon.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXqmmdIuZJA
We can change the civil service law and should, but that doesn’t solve the problem. We must cut programs, agencies, whole Departments, the funding goes with them. Congress must cooperate because the regulatory regime, like taxes, has to be replaced and a budget approved. We must give folks time to find jobs. The new President gives marching orders to his new secretaries who tell new Assistant Secretaries and DASs that employees can sign up to take six months or more to find a job and the training or go almost immediately. There will be voluntary departures and congressional support if a new President who ran on government reform cleaning up corruption and cutting budget makes himself credible. Not easy but better than a hiring freeze.
How many votes are truly controlled by federal civil servants? Enough to actually swing an election?
In the 1990s the Great White North got out of its crippling deficits with hiring freezes, outright layoffs, and downloading health and welfare spending to the provinces.
There were protests, sure. There were strikes, of course. There was a significant drop in civil service morale (the poor creatures).
But the Liberal government that instituted the reforms stayed in power for over a decade before being brought down (mostly) by an embezzlement scandal (i.e. not brought down because of its spending cuts).
Go ahead and freeze. Tell the states to pay for their own programs. It won’t cost you votes.
Yes indeed move the programs to the states and let them pay if they want to keep them and let the Federal employees go there to work. That’s where I started all this. But the deficits are not the biggest problem, the regulations, the complexity and favoritism in the tax and regulatory codes and the tilt toward big business and against entrepreneurial activity are the biggest problems. The spending is dead weight but the purposeful interventions are crippling to new and small business. (another reason to like Carly) They must be ended. The deficit is a problem because the spending is dead weight and if we do not generate enough savings to pay for it we must borrow abroad. The right tax code, the right regulatory laws can give us growth and more savings as a share of that income.
For that, you’ll need a new constitutional amendment to shore up the 10th Amendment. It’s clearly not enough to say that anything not in the constitution is the domain of the states, because the Supreme Court will bend over backwards to find any way to say the constitution grants the power to the feds.
The responsibility of the states to regulate all intrastate matters needs to be an enumerated power.
Mis,
When are you moving to the US?
As soon as the law is changed to include “cutting the asinine crap” as work that Americans won’t do and therefore is grounds for a green card.
;-)
sorry. really.
OK, reading the comments has sapped me of most of my hope.
We can’t follow Canada’s lead, because it was Canada’s political left that acted like grownups. In the US, the left is actively resisting any long-term solutions. Obama even rolled back Clinton’s successes with tax and welfare reform. We cannot trust any long-term deals to withstand a transfer of power.
Cutting departments is probably the most effective way to start, but it will require hand-to-hand combat in the halls of Congress as well as the White House. A transformational GOP president would need to inspire not only the GOP House and Senate leadership, but the rank and file would need to buy into the program too. I’m not optimistic that Congresscritters are about to cut funding for their own districts and constituents.
How to deal with the courts? Pack them? Again, Congress would need to be on board.
Maybe the states could generate some efforts toward reform. But the coastal blue states will hold out for a long time, effectively closing off the avenue of a constitutional convention. And seeing GOP governors sign on to Medicare expansion leads me to question whether red states will ultimately have enough gravity to make a difference. I’m beginning to wonder whether, on our current trajectory, the most likely outcome might be a Federal bailout of bankrupt blue states, followed by some attempt at secession by the others.
One thing is clearer to me, though: If there is to be any hope at all, the next president needs to be a person who appreciates the scope and depth of the problem, and is prepared to take decisive action. This is not something that can be addressed by tinkering at the margins. Once the next president gets sucked into a discussion of the merits of this or that bureaucratic initiative — whether Common Core or expanded NSA surveillance — the game is lost.
“But what about the children? You hate the poor! Racist!”
You need to get the public behind this first.
Ah, but they only did it because they had a very strong conservative opposition (in the form of the Reform Party) pushing really, really hard, rather than a CINO opposition willing to bend at every juncture out of fear of appearing “extreme”.
No you don’t. Republicans could have done it when they controlled the White House and both house of Congress. Sure they mighta lost the next election, but then that happened anyways.
I see secession, sooner or later. At some point, the Blue States will be happier for the Red States to leave, and they may even suggest it or give them a push.
In other words, the BadWhites will be invited to leave by the GoodWhites.
Why should we be the ones to leave? I say we eject the blue states. America isn’t for everyone. It sure isn’t for Blue States.
I fear that if you think this is even a remote possibility that you haven’t gotten out much lately.
Why would we need a constitutional amendment? Just send the programs to the states with brief periods of no strings money. Wholesale slaughter, be it tossing the tax or regulatory regime, or zero budgeting, is more doable than reform, cutting with a chainsaw easier than with a scalpel. While the totality of the thing to be slaughtered is absolutely unknowable, beyond anyone’s grasp, every program, dollar spent, line in the tax code, reach of the regulatory code exists for a reason and will be defended. This means all “reform” becomes a giant log roll, (there are other impolite words for it) and nobody will understand the totality of the results until time and unintended consequences reveal what has been done. (Consult Nancy Pelosi on how that works) K street are professionals, they compete with each other and must fight to the death against relative loss. They can live with outcomes in which all oxen are gored especially if their clients don’t really lose. Moreover the idea of a flat tax, or the idea of empowering the states and making programs accountable, can be sold. The vague, indeed meaningless term of “reform” is not an idea around which a new President can rally the people. Simple ideas are the high ground that can be defended. Sure there are casualties and losses but victory is possible. The alternative may lead to tactical victories but the war will still eventyually be lost.
The problem is that the public is simply parroting what pundits on CNN and MSNBC are telling them to say.
What I think is more likely is that as this country becomes more and more socialist, and taxes are raised, more and more wealthy Americans, and even middle class, will start leaving. We’re seeing more and more companies leaving due to this problem. When that happens, America will realize her mistake, but it will be too late. Success is not a four letter word. Neither is profit. Or wealth.
Approve it before reading it, right?
yes, and you can see how “poll” results run parallel to the previous days coverage. Right?
It is almost as if current polls are just a quiz on if you watched the MSM ‘reporting.’
The Liberals of the ’90s weren’t exactly a Leftist party either. The moonbats stay in the NDP, which allows the Libs to remain a centre left party (though, that seems to be changing with their current fluffy bunny of a leader). Also, there’s a strong line of “Peace, Order and Good Government” types that make up the establishment of that party that makes them much more serious governing party.
Plus, to Mis’ point, the Reform party pushed them hard toward the Right.
I do agree that it’s unlikely to happen in the US, since there are so many radicals infesting the Democrats. However, there is some hope because a structural change, once made, is going to be difficult to reverse as long as the Republicans maintain control of the legislature.
There is no such thing as sending money with no strings attached. Maybe for very brief periods it can be done, but there is no such thing as a government program that exists for only a brief period.
A brief period is all that is needed. Then the states take over, rearrange or eliminate.
Why would the states take over when they’re getting money from the feds? And why would the feds stop and give up control? It is not in the nature of federal or state behavior for this to happen.
Yep. On all accounts.
It’s not a mandate, its what we do with the programs. If liberals don’t really want the programs they can kill them as soon as Federal money runs out, or they could actually try to figure out how to accomplish the objective programs are supposed to address. If citizens of those states still don’t want the programs then it’s because they have to spend their own money. That is just fine.
THIS^