"Safe And Effective" In A Picture; Plus, NYT Explains Why We Need To Vote Trump--Even If He's In Jail

I picked this up from Tom Luongo this morning. Whatever else you say about the UK’s NHS, they keep thorough stats. This fits in nicely with Ed Dowd’s presentation from yesterday:

Dr. Simon Goddek

@goddeketal

"The vaccines are safe and effective," they said. "It is the unvaccinated who are dying," they said. THE REALITY:

5:31 PM · Jul 18, 2023

Somehow or other I wound up on the NYT email list. Among the articles emailed to me this morning was this one:

Donald Trump and his political allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over every part of the federal government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, according to Times interviews and a review of his proposals.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? And the NYT serves up enough details to make any conservative’s mouth water for more. A president taking back control over the executive agencies that are currently controlled by special interests, ideologues, and Congress—woops, I repeated myself a bit, there, didn’t I? Imagine there’s no Permanent Government, it’s easy if you try:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Wow! A president being … the chief executive over the Executive Branch. How subversive is that? But, doesn’t Congress still get to fund the president? This actually sounds suspiciously like a restoration of Checks and Balances.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

For “alter the balance of power” read: Restore the system of checks and balances and restore presidential authority over the Executive Branch, rooting out the abuses of the captive Administrative State—captive to special interests and the Big Money that owns legislators.

And ya gotta luv that bit about “law or tradition”. To the extent that laws make agencies independent, those laws are almost entirely unconstitutional. As for “tradition,” um, whose tradition? Leftist tradition? Could we have a witness to tradition from the Constitution?

“Political interference by the White House”—would that be anything like the POTUS managing government in accordance with the platform that he was elected on? Yeah, that’s politics—so? Don’t like it? There’ll be another election. It’s in the Constitution. The NYT sounds like they want to cement their preferred version of government into permanent place.

How bad could this get? Well, Trump wants to make unelected officials of the Permanent Government directly answerable to We The People, through the POTUS—the only nationally elected official we have (well, OK, VP too):

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — … — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

For me, that’d be kinda like Christmas about a month late—starting on January 20, 2025.

It’s a fairly long article and relentlessly slanted, following a liberal revisionist version of history. Nevertheless, for critical readers they do kinda let the cat out of the bag:

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

Maximalist = Originalist—see below.

So-called = derogatory innuendo. There’s nothing so-called about it. It’s the Unitary Executive Theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

YES. Article II really does vest executive power in the POTUS. Period. Here’s the full first paragraph of Article II:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

There is no limitation stated on that power. Not in the Constitution. There is no mention of Executive Branch officials being independent of the POTUS’ executive power or being immune from termination, er, firing.

NO. The unitary executive doesn’t eliminate checks and balances. We still have a judiciary ruling on the Constitution and laws, we still have a Congress passing laws that the President is charged with upholding and with power over spending.

But, YES, the Constitution DOES make the President the only Constitutional executive official (I know, I know). What Article 2 DOES NOT do is to establish a permanent Fourth Branch of government—the Administrative State. To the credit of the NYT, they do present an incisive statement from a conservative:

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Bingo. Show me another candidate who openly plans to restore constitutional order. I’ll consider voting for him. But right now, it’s gotta be Trump.