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November 2020: The People Must Repudiate the Deep State
Assuming President Trump survives impeachment his 2020 campaign must focus on a win being a repudiation of the Deep State. If he succeeds in doing so and the win is sufficiently large in the Electoral College, he might, just might, start putting out the fire in this country.
Are we on fire? Yes. It’s like a peat fire burning underground with periodic eruptions above ground that you have to scramble to contain. It is a drain on time and energy that could be more productively put to other uses. And if you don’t attack the eruptions, the whole land will become charred and burned.
Two stories have prompted my thought this morning: (1) “Whistleblower Was Overheard in ’17 Discussing With Ally How to Remove Trump” by Paul Sperry with Real Clear Investigations embedded at Powerline blog under “Paul Sperry: Whistleblower Overheard,” and (2) Mark Levin’s interview of Christoper Caldwell regarding his book Age of Entitlement on the most recent episode of Life, Liberty & Levin. They serve as bookends.
The first describes the effrontery of the “whistleblower,” Eric Ciaramella, and Adam Schiff’s staffer Sean Mikos of discussing the necessity of and how to “take out” Trump just after being briefed in 2017 by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on the new President’s foreign policy agenda. (The new President is not to be permitted to set a direction in foreign policy of which the Deep State does not approve.)
The second describes how the Deep State was created in the 1960s to address legitimate problems. But the tools created for those purposes have had the net effect of making America less democratic — the people less sovereign. And, as Caldwell describes, the Deep State exploits the fact that its machinations confer benefits on some of the people all of the time, so that the people who benefit at any particular time do not object to the loss of sovereignty.
But now we see clearly the danger of the Deep State and the loss of electoral sovereignty. “Normal politics” by which I mean everything that predated President Trump and came after Calvin Coolidge, involved the mutual benefitting alliance between politicians and the Deep State — each propping up each other. And so it was that it took an outsider to reveal the decadence of the politicians and the stranglehold the Deep State had gained over the people.
We thought we had a stark choice in 2016. We have an even starker choice in 2020. President Trump needs to increase the amperage in his re-election and the people need to apply the electrodes to truly tame this beast.
Published in General
Add to that the recording in question apparently was made over a year before Yovanovitch was removed, and that any ambassador serves at the pleasure of the President. Trump has the right to fire them in the same way he could fire the head football coach or the general manager of his USFL team back in the 1980s without cause, a year after he said he was thinking about firing them. You can dispute the policy or the motives, but it’s still within his right to do so.
So what took so long if it was important.
And presidents don’t really have rights. Rights belong to individuals, not offices. Presidents have duties and powers.
When you don’t have much of anything to go on that is prima facie impeachable, then Trump venting out loud about Yovanovitch becomes another part of an impeachable offense for House Democrats, who have to find an outlet for venting their anger at Trump.
@billnelson, thank you for the courtesy of your response.
Evening Bill,
I think you have given a legalistic defense of the “deep state” I think the biggest threat to our republic is the “deep state”. I am not using the term to irritate you but because I can think of no other term which better expresses the immense corrosive and corrupt power of the bureaucracy. As Rodin has mentioned, it is natural for groups to try to enhance power, to view their tasks as essential and important, and to view their experiences as evidence of superior expertise and knowledge. As bureaucracies get bigger and become entrenched they become less and less accountable. The power is accrued by longevity and not by skill, the people in leadership are examples of the Peter Principle and not because they have a track record of skill or insight. Failures are not fired (almost impossible to do), at worst they are transferred. In our republic, the Dems and the bureaucracy have made an alliance, the dems promise generaous funding, and in return (like old-fashioned unions) the govt employees promise election support. This alliance creates a govt destined for growth and a govt that is increasingly indifferent to the voters. These problems are universal to large goats.
In addition to the corrosive effects created by the growth of bureaucracies, bureaucracies encourage corruption. First our govt employees are almost never held accountable, think Carter Page, Sheryl Attkisson, and Catherine Engelbrecht of the King Street Patriots. Each of these folks, Page and Engelbrecht are not national figures, and Catherine is just an average citizen. In none of these cases has anyone been charged let alone found criminally guilty. Bill you suggest that there was no meeting to target Tea Party folks, well let us lay out the history of govt harassment of Catherine as laid out by Kim Strassel in “The Intimidation Game”. Here is what happened to Catherine for becoming politically active (for the wrong, evil party). After running Engelbrecht Manufacturing hassle free from 1994 to 2010, the IRS showed up to audit two years of taxes, the FBI called 4 times and had 2 personal visits, the ATF showed up for an audit (which was “Bizarre” because although Engelbrecht Man had a license to manufacture gun parts, the don’t not do so, OSHA also showed up and gave the company a $25,000 fine, this was followed by a visit by the Texas Commission on Environment Quality (based on an anonymous complaint). So Bill you may be correct that there was now grand meeting led by the ambitious partisan Lois Lerner to harass Catherine, but clearly there was an orchestrated attack on this Tea Party organizer. Where was the honest FBI agent who knew in 5 minutes that Catherine Engelbrecht was a totally innocent citizen.
Here I will quote from “The Intimidation Game” to show how different agencies did in fact co-ordinate to squash political opponents. “The participants proposed a ‘three-way partnership’ between the DOJ, the FEC, and the IRS. Lerner in the meantime also arranged for the IRS to transmit 1.1 million pages of non-profit tax-return data to the FBI, so that G-men could start trolling through the database for potential crimes. This was a few days before the 2010 elections. The database contained confidential taxpayer information that is protected by federal laws and that Justice chould never have had.” So where were the honest FBI agents who informed on this transfer of confidential info., there were no agents who thought protecting the privacy of the average Republican citizen was worth saying a word.
This is the real problem. As an unelected bureaucracy gains more authority, it is going to exercise that authority, more and more, as the “experts” within the bureaucracy believe best meets the goals of the bureaucracy.
This Churchill quote also applies:
“If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law. As Burke said… ‘Those who make professions above the ordinary customs of society will often be found in practice to fall far below them.’”
Go back to the issue where the IRS was not providing fair review for conservative groups tax category applications. How do you fix this? You fix this first by reducing the ability of the IRS to make this choice, and pass a law which punishes abuse of this tax status (to pass court muster, it cannot be ambiguous). And then add transparency, so that the IRS provides status of all such applications as public record weekly.
And then rely on law. If someone in the FBI is reviewing tax records not part of an active investigation, that is a violation of law (or should be). But if there are groups within various agencies willing to break the law, then there must be some severe consequences to squash this. This may require the DOJ to prosecute themselves.
This may be a case where some governmental waste and duplication is needed.
Each department has an independent IG. The problem is that these inspectors can do nothing until a complaint is raised. If the employees of an agency choose to violate law, then we are indeed in a difficult position.
But I do hate waste and duplication.
I question how independent any IG can be. What is the career path for an IG? Advancement is probably going to require the approval of the same people he is supposedly watchdogging.
But if you have another department with prosecutorial authority that is inclined to protect its own prerogatives in turf battles, then you might have people whose careers will benefit from rooting out corruption in their rivals. It’s wasteful and inefficient, but I’m all for that kind of waste and inefficiency.
Afternoon Bill,
I think you are not fully describing the difficulty exposed by the IRS, DOJ, FBI corruption in Tea Party cases. You suggest passing laws, to do this presumes a political climate that doesn’t exist and I am not sure ever has existed in modern times. First the Dems want the “deep state” to behave as they did, and they will not support any laws limiting department authority, and the Republicans never put oversight at the top of their list even when dept. heads laugh in their faces. Recall Comey laughed when Grassley said that it is often the case that the intel committee finds out things about the FBI from the media and not from its oversight briefings. The admin state will not sabotage Dems the way they will Republicans and everyone knows it, and Republican leaders have given up on Federal Employee reforms.
At ground level, govt rules, policies, and day to day workings strip the honor and character from their employees. My wife worked for the VA for 10 years and volunteered for 15, and her best friend still works there. When she worked at Radiation/Onchology, at first there was two nurses. One of the nurses was so indifferent to patient care, that the entire staff asked for here to be removed or fired, from docs, to radiation therapists, to clerks. The VA said ok we will transfer her but you have lost that nursing position and will only have one nurse for your department now. This was standard procedure, it will cost you if you make a fuss about staffing. There are many good folks at the VA, but they are swimming many folks who should be working in another field or another place because their work is subpar. These subpar workers who get paid the same, and never get penalized for poor work create a work environment where folks will not stand up against wrong doing. Who successfully sues the VA, and so what, will the VA go out of business? Reticulator has an interesting thought, use some type of competitive check to help police the admin state. Perhaps have departmental budgets related to how the depts stack up when independently audited.