Briefly Noted: The Administrative State, Excess Mortality

I want to point out two articles worth readers’ attention.

The first is by Jeffery Tucker and offers a layman’s explanation of the rise of the administrative state to supremacy over the constitutional order embodied in the US Constitution. As Tucker says, this supremacy has been made abundantly clear during the Covid Regime. Indeed, Fauxi is still going around stating that public health measures are the exclusive province of public health bureaucrats and judges and courts should butt out.

Here’s a sample:

Elections Won’t Fix This

Americans have limitless faith in democracy. In the early 19th century, that charmed Alexis de Tocqueville. His book Democracy in America still rings true today because not much has changed. The entire country can be in ruins and even then, most people figure that it will all be improved or even solved come November. It’s been going on for our entire history. As a people, we believe our elections are what keep the people and not the dictators in charge. 

... 

This faith in our elected leaders is belied by the experiences of the last 30 months. To be sure, the elected politicians are nowhere near blameless in what unfolded and they could have done far more to stop the disaster. Trump could have sent Fauci and Birx packing (maybe?), the Republicans could have voted no on trillions in spending (did they really have a choice?), and Biden could have renormalized the country (why didn’t he?). Instead they all went along…with what? With advisers from the bureaucracies, the people who have de facto ran [sic] the country for this entire grim period. 

Reading Scott Atlas’s book, one comes away with a very strange picture of how Washington worked in the first year of the pandemic. Once Trump gave the green light to lockdowns, the permanent bureaucracy had all it needed. In fact, this happened even before Trump approved it: the Department of Health and Human Services had already released its lockdown blueprint on March 13, 2020, a document which had already been weeks in the preparation. After the March 16 press conference, there was no going back. The “deep state” – by which I mean the permanent non-appointed bureaucracy and the pressure groups to which it answers – was running the show. 

The administrative state has probably not enjoyed such a good run since World War II or perhaps much earlier if ever. ... The CDC provided the cover but acted pretty much like a dictator. 

We know this for certain given the CDC’s response to the Florida’s judge’s decision to declare the transportation mask mandate illegal. The response was not that the mandate was both compliant with the law and necessary for public health. Instead, the agency and the Biden administration too rallied around a simple point: the judge’s decision cannot stand because courts should have no authority to override the bureaucracy. They actually said it: they demand total, unchecked, unquestioned power. Period. 

This is alarming enough but it speaks to a much larger problem: a hegemonic bureaucratic class that is not controlled by the political class and believes that it possesses total power. The implications extend far beyond the CDC. It applies to every executive agency of the federal government. They ostensibly operate under the authority of the office of the president but actually not even that is true. There are severe restrictions in place on the ability of the elected president to fire anyone among them. 

Trump couldn’t fire Fauci, at least not easily, and he was told this repeatedly. That pertains to millions of other employees in this category. This was not the traditional American system. In the days before 1880, it was routine for new administrations to toss out the old and bring in the new, and yes of course that included cronies. 

That system came to be derided as the “spoils system” and it was replaced by the administrative state with the Pendleton Act of 1883. This new law was passed in response to the assassination of President James Garfield. The culprit was an angry job seeker who had been rebuffed. The supposed fix, backed by Garfield’s successor Chester A. Arthur, was to create a permanent civil service, thus supposedly reducing the incentive to shoot the president. It initially pertained to only 10% of the federal workforce, but it had developed vast power by the time of the Great War. 

It wasn’t until I read Alex Washburne’s piece on Brownstone that the full implications became obvious to me. …

So, what has the administrative state done for the West over the last 30 months? Alex Berenson suggests an answer. It’s not apodictic proof, but science begins with anecdotal evidence—and God knows there’s a mountain of that that’s been accumulating and getting harder and harder to explain away.

Again, an excerpt:

URGENT: Death rates are soaring again in highly vaccinated European countries

All-cause mortality is spiking - right on schedule, three-plus months after booster mRNA shots - and mostly in the elderly, the most highly boosted group. It's getting hard to see this as coincidence.

Only months after suffering a huge and unexplained increase in their death rates in the fall of 2021, many Western European countries are seeing a new spike.

The increase includes some Covid deaths but is not limited to them. Several countries now have death rates more than 15 percent above normal, an extremely unusual event - especially since demographers expected death rates to fall as Covid eased.

The spike last fall came a few months after near-universal Covid vaccinations. This spring’s rise comes on the heels of third-shot “booster” mRNA jabs that were far more common in Europe than the United States.

Notably, while last fall’s increase encompassed adults of all ages, this one is taking place mostly in the elderly, who were the focus of the booster campaign.

The excess deaths are occurring in countries that currently have large waves of Covid, like Portugal, and in those that do not, like England.

England and Wales have had 45,950 deaths in the most recent four weeks (through May 20), compared to the five-year average of 39,716, according to Britain’s Office of National Statistics. That’s more than 6,000 extra deaths, a 16 percent increase.

All this was done by the unaccountable “experts” of the administrative state.