Some Talking Points
A Few Things A Guy With A Yale Law Degree Probably Already Knows, But Maybe Thinks You're Too Dumb To Figure Out On Your Own?
I just made the mistake of cracking open the Washington Post (no, I haven’t cancelled my subscription, for various reasons), and the front page announced that Trump has tapped “Musk, Ramaswamy to oversee ‘drastic’ changes to U.S. government.” At one point, early in the article, Ramaswamy is quoted as saying:
“We have a fourth branch of government — the administrative state — that our Founding Fathers didn’t envision. Removing the excess bureaucracy is going to be good for our economy and for our national spirit.”
Anyone who encounters this line of reasoning should be aware of a couple of things.
At least some of the founders did, sort of, envision an administrative state. Alexander Hamilton believed in a broad interpretation of the general welfare clause, that would have allowed Congress to tax and spend on education, agriculture, and infrastructure projects like canals, dams, roads, and bridges. The presidential administrations of Washington and Adams both enacted policies that agreed with Hamilton’s interpretation. While that doesn’t explicitly create an administrative state, it certainly demonstrates an intention to have administrators and experts involved in the disposition of funds to advance the goals of the general welfare clause.
The administrative state isn’t a fourth branch of the government. It’s the executive branch, empowered by specific legislation. That’s literally how the Constitution says the executive and legislative branches are supposed to interact. There’s nothing in the Constitution about mandatory time limits on executive authority, or legislative or judicial review of executive authority once the legislature empowers it, except in one very specific case…
There was a “fourth branch” of the government that the founders were super paranoid about, and they included a clause in the Constitution to prevent it from coming into existence — and, ironically, it’s basically the only kind of administrative state the Republicans absolutely love. I’m talking, of course, about our massive — and massively funded — standing military. The founders were all nervous about standing armies because of the British Empire, and regarded standing armies generally as a threat to peace, and the safety of the citizenry. This is why the Constitution includes the Army clause, specifying that only Congress has the power to declare war, and raise and support armies — but that “no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
The federal bureaucracy is only “excess” in the way that seatbelts, airbags, seat brackets, safety glass, padded dashboards, shock absorbers, catalytic converters, carburetors, headlights, automatic starters, crumple zones, etc are “excess” parts of a car. Strictly speaking, a car is an engine, a drivetrain, a steering mechanism, and a brake. Bureaucracy is there to make government safe and responsive and, contrary to popular opinion, to make sure it can do the things politicians want it to do as efficiently as possible.
So, to recap: the founders had mixed feelings about an administrative state, but some of them were strongly in favor of one; the administrative state isn’t a fourth branch of government; and the only part of the so-called administrative state that the Constitution specifically forbade is a standing military, which Republicans frigging love. The parts of the federal bureaucracy that Musk and Ramaswamy are going to “trim” because they’re “excess” are parts that keep government from being a noisy, polluting death-trap.
Tell your friends. It probably won’t do any good, but these are the softball parts of these conversations and we can at least swing at the easy pitches.