I am thankful that throughout my life my
interaction with the administrative state has been confined to the routine.
Obtaining a driver’s license, filing taxes, and filing my marriage license.
Recently I have had a friend get caught up in
the administrative state. I won’t go into details but essentially it boils down
to an administrator acting as judge and jury for the rules and regulations
their administration created and executing those decisions.
These decisions impacted my friend’s personal
life on a level to which the government was never meant to interfere. This
administrative agency combines the powers of the judiciary, the legislature,
and an executive, yet remains un-elected and largely unaccountable to the
people.
Consent of the Governed
In the American system of government the consent
of the governed is obtained through voting for representatives. These
representatives are imbued with a part of the power of each individual person through
an election.
These representatives, imbued with this power,
create laws and administer various functions of the government. If the people
believe their representative is doing a bad job, lacks sufficient character, or
they generally do not like the person they are free to select a new
representative when their term is up.
These representatives must repeatedly return to
the people to renew this consent to represent them. This means that
representatives are accountable to the people they represent and only have
power in so far as it has been granted to them by the consent of the people.
The Loss of Consent
The administrative state does not operate with
the consent of the governed. Instead they claim their authority from expertise.
This allows administrators to remain insulated from the ‘dirty business’ of
politics. This insulation from the consent of the governed was not produced by
accident, but rather a key feature of the Progressive system of politics and
administration.
The Progressives believed that if they could
empower experts and remove them from having to deal with running for elections,
then those experts would be able to make the right decisions and could use the
power of the government to solve the problems of their time.
In order to achieve this, Progressives needed to
reject the ideas of the Founders. Chiefly the ideas of the consent of the
governed and the separation of powers. By ‘freeing’ experts from politics to
focus on administration, they dispensed with the consent of the governed.
Unification of Powers
The Progressives believed that the separation of
powers was both inefficient and irresponsible. They thought it was inefficient
because it would take a long time to get anything done. They considered it
irresponsible because it made it difficult for popular will to be translated
into government action.
The solution was to combine the powers of
government (legislative, judicial, and executive) into administrations headed
up by experts (rational educated progressive people) who could use the power of
government filtered through their expertise to solve the problems of a modern
world.
We see this today in the various administrative
agencies, who can make rules and regulations that have the power of laws, often
are able to act as judges for disputes that arise due to those rules and
regulations, and can take action to enforce rules and regulations or impose
punishments on those who violate them.
At the same time the Progressives did away with
the separation of powers, they focused on increasing democratization of
politics. This was to amplify the power of public opinion (majority faction) in
politics.
The paradox of this Progressive model of
politics and administration is that while it increases the volume of public
opinion in politics, it removes the power of that opinion from almost any
influence it would have on administration.
Meaning the power of the administrative state is
separated from the consent of the governed. Yes we get to vote for President
and for Congress and for Governors but we do not get to vote for the head of
the EPA. The people we vote for do not debate each other and create laws, the
EPA simply produces them out of thin air.
We can voice our opinions louder and we have
some impact on the administrative state but if the expert in charge of an
administrative agency decides to ignore the will of the people, there is very
little to almost zero recourse for the people. They do not require our consent
to exercise all the powers of government, instead they claim their authority
from their expertise.
Human Nature
This near worship of expertise denies something
the founders understood clearly. That no matter how much of an expert any
individual was, in the end they are still a human being. A human with all the
same flaws, faults, interests, emotions, and capacity for good and evil as any
other person.
This is why the separation of powers and the
consent of the governed are so important. The consent of the governed allows
the people to invest their power into another human being. They can take into
account the nature of the person and decide if they are the right person to
entrust with their representation.
The separation of powers is important because it
helps protect the rights of the individual (the greatest minority) and provides
a tempering for the passions of the people as well as a restraint on the power
of those who are entrusted with governing.
In order to have a representative government,
meaning a government by the consent of the people, you must have a limited
government. If the government is larger than the people than it is no longer
representative of the people but represents those in government. It is not
merely the size of the government that poses a problem but also the manner and
structure of that government.
Our government by the consent of the governed is
slipping away and instead of working to restore that limited form of government
we have been more interested in fighting over who controls an ever increasingly
powerful administrative state. Now is the time to make the choice, do we want
the liberty to pick up the responsibility to solve the problems of our times
ourselves or do we want to entrust our life, liberty and happiness into the
hands of administrative experts?
They want to make it seem like this was a decision they came
to reluctantly only after long hours of research, investigation, and
contemplation. When in reality they already decided they would impeach, they
only needed to wait for a reason. When a good reason never provided itself,
they decided to manufacture one.
