October 01, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 49 Comments Tags: Biden, Harris, Federal Regulations
Back in July, I had a two posts (here and here) comparing the then candidates for President, Biden and Trump, on the issue of who is the greater “threat to democracy.” The posts reviewed actions of each candidate that may be viewed as such threats. For Trump, those things included J6, plus seeking legal advice and then bringing litigation as to what he claimed was fraudulent conduct in the 2020 election; for Biden, the things included having the prosecutors bring phony criminal charges against political adversaries, engaging in a systematic effort with social media platforms to suppress the opposition’s speech, extra-constitutional expansion of the regulatory state, hundreds of billions of federal dollars to fund the political Left, the student-loan-forgiveness vote buying program, and opening the southern border. Whew — quite a list! Obviously, the contest wasn’t close.
But now comes to my attention another whole category of threat to democracy emanating from the Biden-Harris Administration. This is one I have been somewhat aware of, but I have not been fully aware of the vast extent and systematic nature of the effort. Likely, this category is the worst of all the threats discussed in the extent to which it represents fundamental attack on the constitutional structure. The subject is systematic efforts within the bureaucracy to make it so that an incoming administration after an election is disabled from making changes to the policies or personnel of the outgoing administration.
If “our democracy” means one thing, it means that the people get to choose the President, who then gets to govern in accordance with the principles and policies that got him elected. The main constitutional provision is Article II, Section 1, which states that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Every federal executive department employee must take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” For an executive branch employee, the most important meaning of the oath is that the employee must recognize that the “executive power” is held by the elected President, and the employee must follow the legal direction of the President. For every employee in the executive branch, the elected President is the boss.
And yet recent months have seen numerous reports — and by numerous I mean dozens — of members of the Biden-Harris Administration taking actions to undermine the authority of Trump should he get elected, and to insulate the bureaucracy from the policies that got him elected. In other words, these are steps to completely thwart the will of the voters. I’ll start with a couple of examples today, and will have more in days to come.
Here is a May 27 piece from Politico, with the headline “Biden’s got a plan to protect science from Trump.” Great spin, Politico. “Protect science from Trump” is code for making it such that unelected fascist pseudo-scientists like Fauci can impose their will on the people completely outside the control of voters or elections. From Politico:
The White House fears Trump could try to advance an ideological agenda at the National Institutes of Health, like the ones he’s suggested on everything from vaccines to diversity policies. In an effort to Trump-proof, NIH has designated an official to identify political meddling in the agency’s work and is tasking a soon-to-be-established scientific integrity council with reviewing those cases. . . . The NIH gives out . . . more than $40 billion a year — and, other than a Senate-confirmed director, has long been able to operate relatively free of politics.
The phrase “political meddling in the agency’s work” means any control whatsoever from the elected boss. $40 billion per year with no accountability of any kind. That’s bureaucratic nirvana!
But then, NIH is very small potatoes compared to the EPA. EPA claims the authority — not from any statute, mind you, but rather from their “scientific expertise” in environmental matters — to force a multi-trillion dollar transformation of the entire energy economy of the country. Recent extra-constitutional EPA initiatives include multiple rules finalized in May 2024 to force the closure of electric power plants using hydrocarbon fuels, and other final rules announced in April and June to force manufacturers to make and consumers to buy mostly electric vehicles within a few years. Trump clearly opposes these rules, and for good reason. If he gets elected by the voters, he intends to undo these rules. Can the bureaucracy actually stop him?
Check out this piece from the Huffington Post on May 29, headline “Preparing For A Trump Return, EPA Workers Secure 'Scientific Integrity' Protections.” Here’s the strategy: the EPA workers, via a labor union, have “negotiated” a collusive contract with the corrupt Biden-Harris Administration whereby workers can report “abuses” of “scientific integrity”:
The union representing 8,000 workers at the Environmental Protection Agency just bargained a contract that includes what it calls “groundbreaking” protections for “scientific integrity.” The agreement assures that workers can report any abuses without fear of “retribution, reprisal, or retaliation,” and sends related disputes to an independent arbitrator rather than a political appointee. . . . “The agency agreed the goal was to empower management and staff to prevent inappropriate interference in scientific work,” said Powell. . . . “Scientific Integrity was one of several articles the parties agreed to include in the new [contract] for the first time,” the spokesperson said in an email. “This new article clarifies for AFGE [union] employees EPA’s commitment to a culture of scientific integrity.”
Because after all, “The Science” requires EPA to force you to drive an electric vehicle and to get your electricity from intermittent wind and solar generators.
Do the voters get any say in these matters? Not if the Biden-Harris Administration and the bureaucrats can do anything about it. Could there be any more fundamental “threat to our democracy”? If so, I can’t think of what it is.
A suggestion to Trump for a counter-strategy should he get elected. For any bureaucrat (for example, at EPA) who resists direction from above, first transfer that bureaucrat to the Utah office; and then prosecute that bureaucrat criminally in Utah for violation of oath of office.
No comments:
Post a Comment