Trump And The Three Branches Of Government

Jeffrey Tucker has a smart article that was picked up at Zerohedge. It’s a useful reminder to those who imagine that a president can actually control the US government. Most of us, until recently, liked to anachronistically think of the US government within the framework of a document that some dreamers cooked up in Philadelphia many years ago. Tucker offers a different framework:

The 3 Layers Of The Technocratic State

While the traditional framework retains some relevance, it has taken on a very different shape than was ever envisioned. In essence, the Legislative Branch has largely turned over its functions to the Executive Branch—lawmaking is now carried out by administrative agencies of the Executive Branch. However, those agencies are no longer controlled by the Chief Executive and his managers—the POTUS. Instead, the administrative agencies are largely controlled by career civil servants—”experts”—who are protected by law from any president who tries to reform them. The Judicial Branch, the SCOTUS, long ago acquiesced to this new system of government and the rest is pretty much history. The populace—the citizens—mostly never had a clue about any of this, weren’t interested, or—among the activist groups—saw opportunities for advancing special agendas. The remaking of America has been under way, really, for over a century and certainly since the New Deal. In effect, the Constitution had been rewritten in the most basic sense.

The Roberts court is threatening this system, revisiting the deference it has long shown to the administrative state. We await new, possibly game changing, decisions in this regard during the current SCOTUS term. Rejection of Chevron deference is in the wind, and if it takes place Congress could end up being forced to go back to the drudgery of lawmaking. Even better, if that proves too onerous they could just do nothing unless prodded by a public uprising.

On the other hand, civil service protections would remain in place and would still seriously limit effective constitutional control over the government. Let’s take a look at some excerpts from Tucker’s article that outline the current state of affairs that a second Trump administration would encounter. Tucker breaks government down into “layers”—deep, middle, and shallow—rather than the currently anachronistic notion of three “branches”:

Donald Trump popularized the term deep state, and it is a good one. There is a large and serious literature on the topic. It refers mostly to the long-operating and largely out-of-public eye intelligence agencies and their cut-outs in the private sector. It is inclusive of security agencies, which means CIA but also some portions of the FBI, NSC, NSA, CISA, DHS, top brass at the Pentagon, and more besides.

They are the most powerful force in American politics and have been for many decades. Anyone who calls them out is called a “conspiracy theorist” simply because there is a lack of documentation for these claims that everyone knows are true. They are “classified,” Washington’s magic term for anything they want to hide from you.

Please reread that last paragraph. Tucker didn’t say that the Deep State controls national security functioning. He said it’s “the most powerful force in American politics …” Tucker points to new attention being paid to the Deep State:

… This new attention is mostly due to a series of audacious plots that unfolded since 2016: the bogus claim of Russia interference in the election, as manufactured by the deep state, the surreptitious weaponization of the justice system still ongoing, as well as the pandemic policies that had deep-state fingerprints all over them.

The middle state is the administrative bureaucracy, the civil service, as they are called. Invented by the Pendleton Act of 1883 and growing through wars and crises, and deeply entrenched in the 21st century, it is more than 2 million strong and consists of more than 400 agencies, some innocuous and some deeply threatening. Elected politicians only pretend to control the middle state but the reality is the opposite. They are the people with permanent positions, institutional knowledge, and the focus to preserve the status quo no matter who shows up in town for the party.

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This is what Trump faced when he was elected. He believed that the president was supposed to be in charge, like a CEO or an owner of a company. ...

Once Trump figured it all out, he assigned his trusted staff to do something about it. He issued a series of [three] executive orders to get the middle state under control. ... Those three orders were litigated by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and sixteen other federal labor unions.

All three were struck down with a decision by a D.C. District Court. The presiding judge was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was later rewarded for her decision with a nomination to the Supreme Court, which was affirmed by the U.S. Senate. The prevailing and openly stated reason for her nomination was said to be mostly demographic: she would be the first black woman on the Court. The deeper reason was more likely traceable to her role in thwarting actions by Trump which had begun the process of upending the administrative state. Jackson’s judgment was later reversed but Trump’s actions were embroiled in a juridical tangle that rendered them moot.

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As recently as last week, Biden’s Office of Personnel Management finalized rules to make it difficult for Trump to strip civil servants in policy making roles of their permanent positions. Yes, the plot against a possible second Trump term is fully engaged already.

The third layer is the shallow state. It consists of legacy media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, in addition to social media companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, as well as common internet tools like Google and Wikipedia. It includes military contractors and tax-supported academia as well.

These are all captured institutions, with revolving doors with the deep and middle states. The reporters at these large media outfits have close relationships with the top bureaucrats at the agencies they cover, which is why the agencies themselves are rarely investigated closely.

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The shallow state also includes a major swath of the banking and financial sector that depends fundamentally on the benevolence of the middle-state Federal Reserve to provide an uninterrupted stream of liquidity to fuel its operations. ...

This stream of liquidity is being challenged by reckless spending, which is undermining the reserve status of the US dollar and forcing the Federal Reserve to drain liquidity.

What is and isn’t included in the shallow state is obviously debatable ...

The relationship between the three layers is perfectly illustrated in the way pharmaceutical companies work. They do the bidding of the deep state with biodefense work that is classified, making both pathogens and antidotes. They work with the middle state, with board members and managers of companies going back and forth with the NIH and FDA, sharing royalties on new patented consumer products. The companies then dominate advertising on all the main media venues, which means that the media covers up for them at every turn and echoes deep and middle state priorities.

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Yes, it all sounds very corrupt. It is. And it has absolutely nothing to do with this document called the Constitution, which is supposed to be the real law of the law. For the three-layer state, this document simply doesn’t matter. A quiet coup has taken place over the decades that has entrenched this wild system in contradiction to everything the Founding Fathers desired.

All three are right now plotting to resist a possible victory by Donald Trump in November. The notion that he would win in 2016 seemed outlandish. But the prospect of returning after a four-year hiatus to gain the presidency again is nearly miraculous. In any case, it is something no one imagined possible a few years ago.

Don’t expect miracles. The SCOTUS is the one institution that is showing any gumption, any appetite for reform, for a return to constitutional government. For all his missteps and the SCOTUS’ slow pace—inherent in our legal and constitutional system—Trump’s judicial appointments remain his major achievement.