This Ain't No Content

Post-Constitutional

I've been thinking on and off about politics, because how can one avoid it? The whole MAGA way of governing looks like a circus. But surely some of the people behind it must have some coherent ideas. I tried to read an article by Russ Vought, Statesmanship in a post-Constitutional moment, for some clues.

I think a critical paragraph is this one:

And in America, the scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The FBI is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The NSA is surveilling the conversations of citizens.

In case it's not clear, this is a reference to the situation a few years ago. It's the entire justification for overturning the political order and starting afresh. But really? I guess it's really true that Jan 6 rioters were jailed, but I would like to hear more about what the NSA and the CIA were doing against the American people.

Let's grant, arguendo, the national security state was weaponized. The Jan 6 participants got their pardons. (Wait, did they all deserve pardons?) Can we expect a pardon for Snowden? Is there anything else that he has in mind to prevent future weaponization of the national security state? We have to assume not every bad actor will be a minion of Joe Biden.

But maybe Mr. Vought's bigger concern has to do with the powers of the executive branch. If I understand it, his thesis is that the consitutional order of the country has curbed the power of the executive too much for over two hundred years, going all the way back to the Madison v. Marbury case that first established that courts could nullify laws and actions they deem unconstitutional.

There is an aside that is hard to parse but has alarming implications.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has given us a vivid picture of where the Left is trying to go. An executive in a monarch with massive historic grandeur and symbolism and no remaining authority. A parliament where a Cabinet of MPs head the departments of state, staffed by career civil servants with purported expertise. The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored back benchers. They want all-empowered career “experts” like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.

What to make of this? The British system is just radically different from the American, not by coincidence. It has its weaknesses, but an inability to bend the executive branch to the will of the British people does not seem to be among them. (Does he think that Brexit was an idea cookied up by career civil servants or scheming MPs?) The fact that the leader who matters is the Prime Minister, not the Queen or King, shouldn't matter unless you're a royalist nostalgic about the days when the power of a monarch was more absolute.

I honestly don't get the reference to Fauci and “experts”. He's not British and what power did he have? He was a spokesperson; he ran the NIAID. He was one of the people behind PEPFAR. (He got a Presidential Medal of Freedom for that.) He edited a medical textbook. Which is the thing is that made him "all-empowered"? Seriously, why is an immunologist with his kind of experience not someone good to have around when you're faced with a global pandemic?

As far as I can tell, Mr. Vought would like a President to have the powers of a monarch in the 18th century, hardly constrained by the other branches of government, able to rule on a whim. Constitutional restraints that exist today are an encroachment that needs to be turned back. This, he says is how American statesmanship can be defined.

At the end, though, we never do get a clear explanation of how this gets him what he wants. I guess a president who has fewer constraints can write more executive orders to make the government do what he wants. But to what end? In the short term, yes, a lot of government can be destroyed (as can allied countries like Ukraine). In the long term, though, the things that need to be done need to be done, whether you employ people in this agency or that agency to do them. Take for example, the folks at 18F. They did a good job, they got cut, but the government still needs to modernize its technology. That need didn't go away.