Power and the presidency

The New York Times is breathless with concern that if Donald Trump wins a second term in the Oval Office, he will consolidate even more control in the White House. “Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands,” the Times reported on July 17. To which I say: good for Trump. Indeed, every Republican presidential candidate should make a similar plan and pledge. The administrative state represents a direct threat to our constitutional order.

As conservatives, our vision is to see the federal government limited to the specific tasks enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, like national defense and a postal service. Though government’s responsibilities have grown and evolved over time, our goal remains to handle as many tasks as possible at the state and local level, closest to the people, and wherever possible to leave the government out of it entirely, whenever the free market or civil society can better address a problem. But when the government does exercise its appropriate powers, it should act through those we elect, rather than the unelected bureaucracy buried deep in Washington.

The Times warns that “Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies—like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses—under direct presidential control.” There are two obvious questions whenever one encounters this idea of “independent agencies.” The first is, “independent of what?”

The answer is simple—independent of control by elected officials. The FCC, FTC, and other “independent agencies” are all products of the Progressive Era, of Woodrow Wilson and others who wanted technocratic experts to rule without interference by political hacks. In the age of Tammany Hall, “independent agencies” were a way to insulate decisions from undue influence and machine politics, to ensure the “right” people made the “best” decisions solely based on their expertise. The result, a century later, is a bloated administrative state that operates insulated from accountability to anyone the people have elected to office.

The second question one ought to ask of independent agencies is this: “Where exactly did James Madison and the other founders write you into the Constitution?” The answer, of course, is that they are not in the Constitution. As anyone who has seen Schoolhouse Rock knows, there are only three branches of government: Congress to write the laws, the president to enforce them, and the judiciary to interpret and apply them in individual cases.

There is no fourth branch for independent agencies to rule over whole industries or swaths of society. James Madison in The Federalist Papers declared it “the very definition of tyranny” to combine all three functions of government in one place, yet that is precisely what we have done with independent agencies, which write the rules, investigate and prosecute those who violate them, and then adjudicate guilt through the agency’s own administrative law judges.

Democrats are generally quite positive about the administrative state, because if they let the D.C. bureaucracy just do its thing, it will invariably produce the liberal results the Democrats desire anyway. They can have the policy outcomes they want while maintaining the façade of independence and expertise. Republicans are not so lucky—GOP presidents and their Cabinet secretaries are constantly fighting their own bureaucrats, trying to bring to heel the civil servants and “independent agencies” that believe they are independent of the will of the American people as expressed at the ballot box.

Our nation is a republic—to keep it that way, we should insist on political accountability for those who govern us, and applaud those who seek to restore our Constitution’s first principles.