GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Steven Greenhut gets it.  "Want Less Corruption? Try Having Smaller Government."  It's simple, really.  "People can never be made incorruptible. We can, however, design governmental systems filled with checks and balances that limit the temptations."

Perhaps Common Dreams contributor Alan Singer is figuring it out.  There's nothing quite like an imperial president using the presidential powers a previous generation of self-styled progressives hailed in ways the current generation of self-styled progressives abhor.  "The Founders imagined the president as an administrator, not a policymaker, and definitely not an imperial unitary executive."

It's always salutary when somebody styling himself "progressive" refers to the plain original language of the Federal Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution is very specific about the powers of Congress and very vague about the powers of the president and the judiciary. While the authors of the nation’s founding documents were explicit that power had to be divided between three coequal branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, they did not anticipate the authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, the cowardice of congressional representatives beholden to a populist demagogue for endorsements and campaign funds, nor the reactionary ideology of a right-wing Supreme Court. It is not fair to blame the founders for events 250 into the future, with the United States in the midst of a major constitutional crisis.

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin placed the responsibility for upholding the Constitution on future generations when he warned that the new government is “A republic, if you can keep it.” Abraham Lincoln recognized the difficulty of maintaining a country based on this one’s founding principles in his Gettysburg Address over 150 years ago when he told the assembled, “We are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The Constitution assigns the president an undefined executive power with some very specific tasks. The president represents the country in talks with other countries and can negotiate treaties, but the treaties must be approved by the Senate; the president can veto or sign bills approved by both houses of Congress, and then they are responsible for enforcing the laws; and the president acts as Commander-in-Chief of the military during a war, nominates judges and ambassadors pending Senate approval, and grants pardons.

Yes, and over the years the so-called unitary executive Mr Singer frets about has been gathering strength.

Congresses pass and presidents sign legislation creating new Swarms of Officers to Harass the People and Eat Out their Substance, while leaving the enforcement to the Officers Themselves, in the form of "The Secretary shall issue Regulations" language.  Moreover, in political economy and public administration, you will encounter people making the argument that such delegation is necessary as no Congress can draft the proper set of policies for all time and the agency charged with enforcement has to be able to adapt, either to changed political and economic circumstances, or perhaps to a new boss in town.

That noted, perhaps the best reason for the Supreme Court to get rid of Chevron deference might be to make Congress more careful about delegating powers properly theirs to the administrative state, or to the next elected dictator's pen and phone.

And here we are, with a set of departmental secretaries not beholden to the coastal cosmopolitans, and I sure hope they have staffers going through all that legislation to identify precisely how much authority they have to issue regulations, and undoubtedly looking for elastic interpretations of the Intent of Congress, the better to be able to generate the rents the campaign contributors to the current government seek.  But department secretaries with a great deal of latitude, and assorted administrative law provisions make a mockery of separation of powers, and they did so long before Mr Singer had cause to fret.

I think the Founders imagined the president as an administrator, not a policymaker, and definitely not an imperial unitary executive. Their bigger fear was that congressional majorities would attempt to usurp the executive’s responsibility to administer laws in order to benefit special interest groups. For the same reason they wanted an independent judiciary to prevent the politically motivated administration of justice. The Trump claim for a unitary executive and virtually unlimited executive power undermines everything they were trying to create.

That undermining might have begun with Woodrow Wilson, but I digress.

Note, dear reader that Arnold "In my Tribe" Kling, no tribune of the Administrative State, raises similar cautions.

The regulatory regime has become too complex for the President to directly take control.

And what if Presidential control over the bureaucracy were feasible? The Presidency would become a frightening power center. We have to take into account the vast increase in the size and scope of the Federal government that has taken place over the past 150 years. If the President could freely work his will over this apparatus, the results would be frightening.

For libertarians, one solution is to somehow claw back most of the power that has accumulated in Washington. I think there is much to be said for that. But much as I would like to believe otherwise, I think that in a 21st century society it is impractical to pare back the state’s regulatory power to what it was two hundred years ago. I am afraid that we have to live with the regulatory state.

That might be, as Mr Kling expands on elsewhere, but could we do with about ninety percent of the "Secretary shall issue" regulations?  They, are, after all, appointed by that authoritarian president and confirmed by that compliant Congress, to use Mr Singer's adjectives.

[P]erhaps, the incoming department secretaries could issue memoranda calling attention to the legislation under which they are issuing orders and regulations, and remind the permanent staff that their responsibility is to faithfully carry out the duties spelled out in their job descriptions.

By the same token, an incoming department secretary might take stock of all the enabling legislation (and there is a lot) and issue new orders to the effect that any regulation more than five years old would be stricken from the Federal Register, and see how many rules might vanish unmourned.

Mr Kling might concur.

The independent agencies are a product of the Progressive era. Progressives wanted to increase the power of voters (direct election of Senators, initiative, recall) while at the same time bringing expertise into government. You can think of this as trying to take power away from politicians and give it to a combination of experts and the people.

The intentions of the Progressives might have been good. But the populist side of the Progressive movement has evaporated. Today’s Progressives fear the voters, who they regard as a threat to “our democracy.”

The expert-management side of Progressivism is working no better. The “independent agencies” have evolved into a self-licking ice cream cone, meaning that their main goal is self-perpetuation, not service.

I fear that the term "progressive" has shifted in meaning in the past 150 years.  Grammatical nitpicking aside, the problem with the unitary executive view of governance is that the powers vested in a president can change with an election.

I worry that Mr. Trump will establish Presidential authority over the bureaucracy in a way that conservatives will come to regret. Loss of independence for the agencies will be good for conservatives only until the next time the left wins a Presidential election.

I wonder if Mr Singer was at all fretful about the executive orders Dementia Joe's auto-pen was issuing.  His Common Dreams colleague Vinnie Rotondaro correctly sees that Our President is taking advantage of erosions of the Constitution that have been long ongoing.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest defiance of the courts—this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations—has triggered another round of liberal outrage. Critics are calling it an authoritarian move, a blatant assault on the rule of law, and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs.

But if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands.

The central truth we keep missing—especially on the left—is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation. The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades of eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority. Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open.

His Sharpie is a better pen than whatever one of his predecessors had to go with his 'phone.

Obama didn’t officially suspend habeas corpus, but in practice, he upheld a system that made the writ meaningless for hundreds of detainees held at Bagram and Guantánamo. The position of his Department of Justice was clear: The executive has the authority to detain and kill, beyond judicial oversight, because we are at war.

This is the true bipartisan legacy that paved the way for Trump. The removal of checks and balances didn’t happen overnight. It was built incrementally, piece by piece, under the banner of national security—with the cooperation and silence of the same liberal establishment that now acts scandalized by Trump’s every defiance.

It’s worth asking: Why wasn’t there more pearl clutching when the executive branch was unilaterally deciding who lived or died abroad, without congressional debate or judicial process? Why didn’t more alarm bells ring when Democrats joined Republicans in handing over war-making powers and then refused to take them back? Why was it acceptable to rule by emergency decree when the emergency was foreign—but suddenly unacceptable when the same logic is turned inward?

How naïve of Mr Rotorando to expect anyone in Washington to stand on principle?  As far as unacceptably ruling by emergency decree in response to an internal emergency, where was he during the corona tyranny?  He's right, though, about Mr Trump not exactly being sui generis.

This is the cycle we’re caught in. Trump exposes the tools others helped create. He strips them of their moral veneer, revealing the ugly core. And rather than confront the system itself, liberals point at Trump as a singular villain—as if everything was working just fine before he came along.

The truth is harder to face: If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere. We need to reckon with the fact that our democracy has been undermined from within—by both parties, for years. We need to challenge not just the man, but the machine.

Reason's Christian Britschgi has ideas about how to challenge that machine.

Wilsonian expertise inherently lends itself to big government, as career bureaucrats accumulate more and more power at the expense of elected officials and private individuals. And because "big government doesn't work" we're all left worse off as a result.

By cracking down on the independence of career civil servants, Trump and Musk are forcing the government expert class to understand that "they and their expert career bosses are not wholly untouchable or fully in charge," Devine writes.

The pushback to this view is that Trump's motive in reining in the bureaucracy is not libertarian, it's Trumpian. He doesn't want to shrink the state. He wants to use it for his own ends. And, as the Cato Institute's Walter Olson argued earlier this month, by moving fast and breaking things, he's also breaking his oath to faithfully execute the laws and uphold the Constitution.

The legal arguments made against Trump's assault on the federal bureaucracy are difficult to get too exercised about once one looks at the specifics.

Moreover, Congressional Article I powers are mostly for show these days.

The president's efforts to cut government all by himself certainly do violate the spirit of the Constitution, regardless of whether courts determine this or that action violates the letter.

The framers envisioned that Congress would be the supreme branch in setting policy, and temperate deliberation and consensus-building would precede any major policy changes.

That's not how things have worked for a while. The past several administrations have alternated between executive-led technocratic expansions of government and populist anti-elite backlashes to it. Congress' main role has been to greenlight everything when their man is in the White House and grind everything to a halt when he's not.

The punishment is likely to continue as long as the political class interprets changes in the governing majority as "full speed ahead with our less-incrementalist agenda" rather than "let's win some of the people who didn't support us by offering better bundles."