Reiniers: Administrative agencies run government
At the very least the United States is on a leftward trajectory to become a European-like welfare state. There are more citizens and non-citizens who expect government assistance than there are those who support themselves. Generations of Americans have been indoctrinated since the New Deal to be dependent on government. This is what the majority now wants. We are past the tipping point.
We easily could have a more autocratic president, not unlike Venezuela, Russia or Ecuador, depending upon how far a populist president will reach to use executive power and to what extent the Congress, the Supreme Court and the voters approve.
Let us not forget that Congresswoman Maxine Waters, reflecting the popular mood of Democrats at the time, said the government should socialize – take over — oil companies. Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Madura shut down television stations – pretty much the same thing. Democrats have been laboring for years to shut down Fox Television. (Constitutional Framer George Mason was worried that by giving our president so much power, “…he will establish a monarchy and destroy the republic.”)
In the here and now Congress could start putting the brakes on government overreach by reigning in our “independent” agencies. Anything else right now with a Democratic administration is pie in the sky. The Republican House will not impeach the president, and Obama’s next appointment to the Supreme Court will be a liberal.
Our government is run by the executive branch and administrative agencies — not our elected legislators. This is true at the state, local and federal levels. Underpinning government agencies are public sector employees, the largest employment sector in the United States. They are largely unionized so government’s approval of collective bargaining guarantees unions of a monopoly on the government’s workforce. The unions dictate the terms and the government complies. They are all Democrats, so nothing would change even if we were to have a Republican administration.
The muscle behind all this is administrative law, a subject somewhat arcane to the low knowledge voter. It would be helpful to understand that 24 percent of the House and 37 percent of the Senate are lawyers. Their number has declined since the advent of the Great Society era when populism gained traction, but nevertheless lawyers are an integral part of the thousands of staffers in both the House and Senate. And keep in mind the thousands of lobbyist-lawyers for special interests who have input. All agencies likewise are staffed with lawyers. (The tsunami of bureaucrats has gotten so out-of-hand since the New Deal that large corporations – in self-defense – have many lawyers on staff.)
Lawyers do nothing if not write. So their large numbers and considerable expertise as wordsmiths make for an endless number of regulations when teamed up with passionate ideologues whose strategy is to micromanage. (The easiest way to understand governmental rule-making ever since the New Deal with its alphabet agencies is to think of micromanagement.)
This is the foundation for the area of legal practice known as administrative law. What most of us do not realize is that bureaucrats have the power to legislate by rulemaking. They “pass” more laws than do legislatures. This is what is responsible for the burgeoning field of administrative law – codified on the federal level as the Code of Federal Regulations.
The Martindale-Hubbell directory is a lawyer database enabling anyone to find lawyers in any specialty. It has 12,267 documents on administrative law alone. As government gets bigger the number will grow. You can’t begrudge them for what they do. The work is there. As long as government is unstoppable, lawyers are the first line of offense and defense.
The ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice had its tenth annual meeting earlier this year in where else but the Valhalla of bureaucracy — Washington D.C. And to nobody’s surprise the first item on the agenda was, “The Next Round of Major Federal Rulemaking: What’s New in Making Rules?”
Phillip Hamburger, a law professor at Columbia University, has written a book with the not-too-subtle title, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Hamburger believes the separation of powers broke down because of progressives like Woodrow Wilson, a proponent of “administrative power,” who believed that “expert commissions would improve society faster and better than a government slowed down by individual rights and separation of power.” But the result is that by “consolidating legislative, judicial and executive power” into governmental agencies, we have “a new unchecked branch of government.”
As the good professor tells us, Americans, “must live under a dual system of government; one part established by the Constitution and another circumventing it.” This is clearly a recipe for unlimited and unstoppable government.
I would argue that too many of us are virtually unaware of how our government works, where the money comes from, and couldn’t care less as long as we get ours. (Washington borrows 37 cents on every dollar spent; and 66 percent of spending goes to social programs.)
This is true of the citizens of European welfare states no matter what size. Even Lilliputian Denmark spends 30.8 percent of its GDP on social programs, and an astonishing 20 percent of its GDP to pay the salaries and benefits of its bloated bureaucracy.
Fear not. We’ll get there sooner or later as we drift farther left. Government is unstoppable.
John Reiniers is a retired lawyer and regular contributor who lives in Spring Hill
