Bookworm Beat 2/20/17 — fighting the self-anointed fourth branch of government

Bookworm Beat 2/20/17 — fighting the self-anointed fourth branch of government

Bookworm Room via Wow! Magazine by Bookworm

The new phrase is “fourth branch of government,” referring to the Progressive bureaucracy fighting exile. It’s time to fight back.

The administrative state is not the fourth branch of government. When I said “interesting times,” I meant it. We all knew that our government had gotten too big and we voted for Trump believing that he would make good on his promise to shrink it.

Trump certainly has been trying to fulfill that promise, but the administrative state has been fighting back in ways we never imagined. Rather than recognizing that our Constitution makes it subordinate to the president, so that it must take its marching orders from him, the administrative state is setting itself up as a permanent government in opposition, determined to continue the policies that put Obama into office and kept Hillary out of office.

The Washington Examiner has written an excellent editorial that warns of the dangers in a self-styled fourth branch of government:

As we once noted in a different context, “civil disobedience is properly the tool of the citizenry, not of those entrusted by it to execute the law faithfully.” We also wrote that America “cannot survive every minor public official becoming a law unto himself.” This is just as true of unconstitutional actions by EPA employees as it was for the official about whom we wrote it — Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court‘s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The Examiner is not the only one sounding this warning. Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA employee and a Democrat is sounding the same warning with special emphasis on people in the intelligence community. Noting the extraordinary power they hold, he says that the only way to keep a free state is for them to keep out of politics — especially since there are constitutional actions they can take if they’re genuinely concerned about a president’s loyalty to the state[…]

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Bookworm is a fellow council member and author at Wow! Magazine.  You can avail yourself of Bookworm’s essays at Wow! and at her website, Bookworm Room.