.
If Bush people
broke Washington in the first place, it follows
they're the reason it remains broken. Some on the left
have noticed big government is a serious problem.
10/3/13,
"Who Broke Washington? George W. Bush: He Gave Rise to the Tea Party," National Journal, Michael Hirsch
"The rebellion against big government really began more than a
decade ago with a growing sense of betrayal among conservatives over
Bush's runaway spending habits."
"During his five years in office, President Obama has often blamed his
problems on what George W. Bush left him with: two wars, a historic
recession, an out-of-control financial system and a huge budget deficit.
But W.'s most enduring legacy to his successor may have been the tea
party movement, and the political dysfunction that it has brought."...
=====================
In June 2007, Peggy Noonan said George Bush #1 and #2 had destroyed the Republican Party. Since at least 2004 the grassroots had more than ample reason to leave the Bush crowd. Her own separation from the Bush admin. began in Jan. 2005:
6/2/2007, "Too bad," Wall St. Journal, by Peggy Noonan:
"What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration.
They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical
marker -- "At this point the break became final." That's not what's
happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad,
and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The
White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because
its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in
the administration don't even much like the base."...
=====================
This shutdown is about ObamaCare:
10/2/13,
"This is About Shutting Down Obamacare," Erick Erickson, RedState
"Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare.
Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t
realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to
repeal it.
This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until
the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare,
we leave the whole thing shut down.
After all, if the government is not spending any money, when we
collide with the debt ceiling in two weeks, we should not have to worry
since the government is spending so little money."...
======================
10/2/13, "Obamacare can be defunded without Senate approval," Examiner, Christopher Collins
====================
Comment: We gave Boehner the people to defund it in Nov. 2010 but he has never allowed a standalone defunding measure to come to the floor. The Beltway GOP loves ObamaCare as much as democrats do. They couldn't care less what the people want or what it's doing to the country. That's what this is about.
======================
The 4th branch of US government by Jonathan Turley:
"The vast majority of “laws” governing the
United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations,
crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats....The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch
now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the
other branches combined."
5/24/13, "The rise of the fourth branch of government," Washington Post, Jonathan Turley, opinion
"The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has
obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself:
It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully
constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise
of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and
agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing
transparency.
This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for
agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch
now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the
other branches combined.
For much of our nation’s history, the federal
government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary
workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have
2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383
nonmilitary sub-agencies.
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s
lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the
United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations,
crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One
study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while
federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.
This
rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to
know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive
or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying
legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But
Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight
on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of
cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative
state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.
The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that
agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of
laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC,
Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe
the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by
the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”
The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of
the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens
facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court
system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however,
Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and
create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is
that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by
an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000
adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies
complete more than 939,000.
These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process,
with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency.
And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial
authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology
consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure
when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest
of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security
Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his
stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the
ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under
administrative charges.
The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented
increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to
go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S.
citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously
guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has
given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When
Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds
officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.
Of
course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the
umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have
evolved into largely independent entities over which the president
has
very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by
political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average
appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career
officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules.
There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications
Commission — that are protected from White House interference.
Some
agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential
orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S.
Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate
Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s
Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the
independence of the agency....
The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch
now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the
other branches combined. The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are
routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows
little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which
internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the
time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and
congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation
of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is
generally perfunctory and dismissive.
.
In the new regulatory age,
presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities,
but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations
and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the
single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.
.
We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government."
"Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University."
.
No comments:
Post a Comment