Tag Archives: government

There Are Three Branches

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Under our constitutional Federal government there are exactly three branches—judiciary, legislative, and executive—neither more nor fewer. The legislative—our Congress—can, and does, create departments (other than the Constitutionally mandated State and Defense (however titled)) and agencies within the Executive Branch. Our Constitution names the President as the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch with sole responsibility for enforcing the laws that Congress enacts.

Whether Congress claims this or that agency to be “independent” or not, all of those agencies, by being within the Executive Branch, are—must be—under the control of the President, which control includes the hiring and firing of all of an agency’s employees, and the firing aspect of that includes politically appointed employees who must be confirmed by the Senate after a Presidential nomination in order to fully take office.

That firing authority was finally acknowledged by the Supreme Court in its just released ruling in Trump v Slaughter, which explicitly overruled the 91 years prior wrongly decided Humphrey’s Executor v US.

William Galston demurred from that ruling in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

While the chief justice is right that the FTC’s executive functions have expanded since 1935, it hasn’t ceased to exercise legislative and judicial functions as well. The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. It’s hard to see why Congress can’t mandate special firing procedures for such hybrid entities.

The FTC isn’t simply part of the executive branch; it was designed to be independent. That’s Galston’s error. There are only those three branches of our government; “independent” agencies cannot exist outside of those three, and being within one or another of them, they cannot be independent. Nor can they carry out, from within one of them, any of the functions of either of the others—that would eliminate the separation of powers that is at the core of our government’s structure.

Galston made this argument, citing James Madison in Federalist No 47:

Separation of powers doesn’t mean the branches of government have no role in any other branch. It means that when “the same hands” control more than one branch of government, the fundamental principles of a free Constitution are subverted.

Madison was right, but Galston’s usage is a non sequitur. “The same hands” do not control more than one branch of government except when one branch dictates to the others how they must go about their constitutionally mandated duties, as Congress attempts to do when it sets about hamstringing the President’s control over the entities in his branch.

In particular, Congress

  • cannot create a legislative agency, place it with the Executive Branch, and then tell the President he must do what that agency requires
  • cannot create a judicial agency, place it within the Judiciary Branch, and then omit the judges from that oversight, leaving that task to the Executive) Branch—to the President
  • cannot reach into either of those other branches and dictate to its chief how he must carry out any oversight
  • must place an agency with judicial functions inside the judiciary branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the Chief Justice
  • must place an agency with executive functions inside the Executive Branch and leave the entirety of oversight to the President
  • must keep an agency with legislative functions inside the Legislative Branch. Only then can Congress specify how oversight must be carried out. Of course, a Legislative Branch agency would have no enforcement capability; that is the sole province of the Executive.

Congress exercises all the control over the Executive Branch it needs and is allowed to have via its constitutionally created ability to control the funds available to the Executive and any of his Departments and agencies, and through the oversight hearings it uses to inform itself of Executive Branch doings.

There’s a Reason for That

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s astute editors noticed, less than a dozen—10, by their count of the fingers of two hands and no toes of either foot—members of the Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in the House of Representatives are willing to oppose the Democratic Socialists of America agenda. My count via the thumbs of just one of my hands (or maybe the social finger of that hand), only one Progressive-Democratic Party Senator is willing to oppose the DSA agenda.

It’s an agenda of government control of our larger businesses (but it won’t stop there), government control of private property, government given (and so able to be taken away) national medicine, ever rising taxes because…”necessity,” and political rather than economic globalization through entirely open borders and an end to deportation of illegal aliens (there being no such thing in the DSA ideology).

Less than a dozen across our Congress. Eleven, out of an aggregate of 255 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen. Those 244 Progressive-Democrat Congressmen demonstrate pretty conclusively that the Progressive-Democratic Party is an overtly socialist party, the direction in which it began moving with the election of Barack Obama as President just 18 years ago, with the pace sharply accelerating after the election of the “squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley just eight years ago.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is rapidly and enthusiastically coming out of the closet, assimilating the DSA (or being swallowed by DSA), and openly asserting that DSA political and economic positions are its own. Those policies are what Party will attempt to inflict on our nation if it gains majorities in the House and Senate after this fall’s elections.

What the Progressive-Democratic Party now Stands For

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With Party’s nomination of three Democratic Socialists of America for our nation’s House of Representatives, its election of DSA member Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, its all but election of a DSA supporter as mayor of DC, and its nomination DSA acolytes for positions up and down the ballot across America, the Progressive-Democratic Party has made plain what it has chosen to stand for.

  • open support for Palestinians and Hamas
  • end to support for Israel, which is genocidal and apartheid
  • defunding our police departments, elimination of the police function altogether(!)
  • end to jail/prison for convicted felons
  • open national borders
    • abolish ICE
    • end deportations
  • seizure of the means of production
    • seize apartments, other rentals from existing landlords
  • Medicare for all—provision of a national, government produced, health system
  • push for all union employment, elimination of right to work provisions
  • packing Supreme Court
  • ever higher income taxes and wealth taxes

None of these is good for our nation. Any combination of them will be disastrous.

That’s the Point

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Recall that one of New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal was a plethora of city government-run grocery stores to sell groceries at “affordable prices”—which, for Mamdani, meant “cheaper than what existing grocery stores were selling.” He could mean only that, else he’d be conceding that those prices already were affordable.

The outcome of such a move is laid out in the subheadline:

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business.

That’s the point.

Like any good socialist, Mamdani wants government to control the producers. Especially if it’s the particular socialist’s government. Getting rid of the little businesses demonstrates to the larger stores and the chains—whose individual stores generally are franchises run by moms and pops or collections of them run by small- or mid-sized businesses—that they’d better kowtow to the socialist government or leave. In either case, that would increase government’s control over the remains.

We Win the Elections

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Bruce Gilley, Portland State University Professor of Political Science and New College of Florida Presidential Scholar in Residence, asked an important question in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

What Do Democrats Mean by “Democracy?”

Then he answered his question:

What Democrats and leftist activists mean by a “transition to democracy” is a transition to permanent Democratic Party rule.

He’s right, except for one misconception: the Democratic Party no longer exists; it has been replaced by the Progressive-Democratic Party, whose adherents subscribe lock, stock, and barrel to the basic tenets of the founders of the modern Progressive movement. Those tenets are, first, the nationalization of our economy, from Teddy Roosevelt’s effort to nationalize one-sixth of our then national economy, our railroads, through Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to seize all of our factories east of the Mississippi to force them to produce what he wanted produced in the amounts and at the prices he wanted, to Harry Truman’s attempt to seize our iron industry because he didn’t like the way a strike was going, to Barack Obama’s successful nationalization of one-sixth of today’s economy, our health care provision and health care coverage industries.

The second Progressive tenet is the utter racism of the movement, from Wilson’s rank consideration of blacks to be intrinsically inferior and thus needing the “protections” of segregation, Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to integrate our military, through to today’s Party and Leftist supporters demand for special treatment of blacks and women, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs inflicted on them, but really an acting out of Party’s and Leftists’ belief that blacks and women are intrinsically incapable of competing in our economy without special treatment, and through also, to Party’s and Leftists’ identity politics which is overtly racist and sexist.

The third tenet is Party’s utter contempt for us average Americans, from Herb Croly’s bland statement that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat, to Progressive-Democrat politicians dismissing the Tea Party movement as Astroturfers and as just bitter Bible-toting and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country to be disregarded, to a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate dismissing millions of us as irredeemable and deplorable, to a Progressive-Democratic Party President averring that 15% of us are just no good.

Thus: what the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians mean by democracy is, indeed, straightforward: “We win elections and run the country our way.” This is empirically demonstrated over the last few years by Party routinely shutting down our government every time its politicians can’t get their way through elections or otherwise politically while being the minority party in the Senate.

Party politicians’ promise—not threat—to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster ranks right up there as concrete demonstration of their definition. They know full well, that eliminating the filibuster will destroy the republican democracy structure of our government and replace it with the tyranny of popular democracy, with them in charge. That destruction is not a bug in their ideology; it’s the end game.