Can Trump Bell the Progressive Cat?
The battle to shrink the last half-century of hypertrophied statism and leftist tyranny.
January 27, 2017
Bruce Thornton
(Yes obongo is clapping for Trump...)
As I listened to Trump’s Inaugural Address, I thought of Aesop’s fable about the mice who were being devastated by a ferocious cat. As they debated what to do, a brash young mouse proposed putting a bell around the cat’s neck. That way the mice would hear its approach and scurry to safety. All applauded until one greybeard mouse posed the question: “Who’s going to put the bell around the cat’s neck?”
Especially in politics, it’s easy to propose simple, if not impossible, solutions to complex problems.
Trump’s speech was a rousing catalogue of promises to “make America great again.” Infrastructure development, rebuilding the inner cities, bringing back jobs to America, securing the borders, returning the power usurped by the feds back to the people, making “America first,” and eradicating Islamic jihad “from the face of the earth” comprise an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Perhaps these are mere negotiating positions to be adjusted later, but politics isn’t business. What a candidate thinks is typical campaign hyperbole, the voting public often considers promises to be taken seriously.
Ask George H.W. Bush, who broke his promise “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and lost his reelection bid. And that was just one costly broken promise. Trump has named a whole pack of cats he has promised to bell.
Just consider Trump’s promise about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Sounds good, but he said nothing specific about reducing the size of the feds, or restoring citizen self-rule. Yes, on Monday he imposed a hiring freeze on federal workers. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981, but that didn’t slow down much the fed expansion in the long term. And Trump’s claim that he will reduce regulations by 75% is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but highly unlikely without a lot of help from Congress.
Trump needs to be more specific, and realistic, about how he will restore power to the citizenry by undoing the un-Constitutional concentration of powers in the executive and its metastasizing agencies, enabled over the years by compliant Congresses and activist Supreme Courts. The result is our country’s feral cat, the bloated federal government spawned and nourished by progressives for nearly a century, with significant help from Republicans. As the fed has waxed ever fatter, the intrusive reach of its
agencies, councils, and bureaus into all aspects of our lives––corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, private organizations, state and local governments––subjects them to the coercive power of federal agencies to regulate, investigate, and punish anything that challenges their technocratic pretensions to greater intelligence and efficiency than the sovereign citizenry possesses.
Along the way, Big Fed imposes billions of dollars in
compliance costs––nearly $2 trillion in 2016–– and erodes the freedom and autonomy of individuals, municipalities, states, churches, and civil society. In addition, these agencies are staffed by 2.6 million anonymous employees with generous salaries and pensions––in one
study, 78% higher than those enjoyed by the private sector–– and union protections from dismissal that rival academic tenure. Fed employees are not accountable to the people or subject to electoral audit, and can survive the changes in political appointees who head the agencies. Worse yet, we may think Congress writes the laws it passes and agencies execute. But in fact agency staffers do the actual law-writing and then execute and monitor the laws they have written, subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers. Congress needs to pass legislation requiring the Constitutional law-making branch to actually write the laws, so they know what’s in them before they pass them.
It’s not going to be easy to rein in the Dem-Fed complex that lies at the root of most problems Trump promises to solve. New heads of agencies appointed by Trump will meet stiff resistance from employees long in the pocket of the Democrat Party. In last year’s presidential race, 95% of federal workers’ contributions went to Hillary Clinton. There already appears to be leaks from the intelligence community attempting to embarrass and delegitimize the new administration. Trump can do only so much with executive orders or directives. To help “drain the swamp,” Congress will have to pass legislation making it easier to discipline and fire federal workers who obstruct or undermine the directives of agency heads.
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I hope I’m being unduly pessimistic, and Trump can achieve even half of his goals, which would go a long way toward shrinking the last half-century of hypertrophied statism and progressive tyranny. But if Trump breaks enough promises, if he fails “to get the job done” as he pledged, or if some crisis like an economic recession or a major terrorist attack erupts on his watch, then he’s likely to end up a one-term president––and the progressive cat will run wild again.
Can Trump Bell the Progressive Cat?
