The most depressing phenomenon in modern politics, as this column keeps glumly pointing out, is people’s indifference to process when they happen to favor the outcome.
Sticklers for constitutional propriety are so used to being howled down as bigots that they often find it easier to keep quiet. If, to pluck an example more of less at random, you argue that the question of same-sex marriage is very obviously a state prerogative, your opponents won’t try to explain why that the issue ought to be a question for the federal courts. They’ll say, “What’s your problem with gay people, hater?”
The violations of the Constitution have trended overwhelmingly in one political direction. Whether on ethical issues or gun rights, on the growth of federal agencies or property seizures by the EPA, conservatives have tended to be on the receiving end, because the chief organs of the state, above all the judiciary, have been colonized by people whose assumptions and prejudices are well to the Left of the general population’s.
Perhaps understandably, under the circumstances, liberals are generally relaxed about imaginative interpretations of the Constitution, whereas conservatives are, you know, conservative about it. Still, I have three words for all those who think that the Constitution belongs to the age of sextants and spinning-jennies. President. Donald. Trump.
Think about it, my progressive friends. Does Trump strike you as a humble sort, a strict constitutionalist, a man deeply aware that he is smaller than the office to which he aspires? To remind you, when he was asked on Twitter by Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska: “Will you commit to rolling back Exec power & undoing Obama unilateral habit? These r sincere questions & I sincerely hope u answer rather than insult,” he replied, “@BenSasse looks more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator. How the hell did he ever get elected?”
What would be the constraints on President Trump in office? What would stop him from, say, harassing critical media? This, after all, is the man who presumed to tell Fox News to get rid of Megyn Kelly because she was insufficiently deferential toward him. Imagine how much more weight he’d be able to throw about as commander in chief.
What would prevent him from deporting people he didn’t like? If President Obama could disregard Congress over immigration policy, so could President Trump. Likewise, if President Obama could harass tea-party groups through the tax system, surely President Trump could pick on organizations he didn’t care for — which, in his case, would cover pretty much anyone from the Occupy movement to the Heritage Foundation.
There’d be no point in complaining about it, my dear Lefties. You allowed the apparatus of executive rule to grow up over decades. It began under Woodrow Wilson, and accelerated under FDR and Johnson; but it reached a whole new level under Obama, especially over the nationalization of health care. When the president mentioned, almost en passant, that small companies which didn’t insure their employees would no longer have to pay a special $3000 tax, minions rushed to give the emperor’s whim the full force of law.
The Founding Fathers moaned a lot about arbitrary government, but George III never tried to legislate by giving a press conference. That unhappy monarch was well aware of 1689 Bill of Rights, chunks of which were copied, without amendment, into the U.S. Constitution: “The pretended Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regall Authority without Consent of Parlyament is illegall”.
That pretended power is now the standard way of doing business in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. Constitution wanly asserts that “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” In fact, most laws these days are made by regulatory bodies answerable, ultimately, to the Executive. Sure, these bureaucracies were at some point given their powers by a past Congress. But as F.A. Hayek observed in 1944: “The delegation of particular technical tasks to separate bodies, while a regular feature, is yet the first step by which a democracy progressively relinquishes its powers.” Nowadays, an agenda is advanced by unaccountable agencies that would never get through any elected assembly.
By this time next year, that colossal state machine, with all its buttons and dials, might be at the Donald’s disposal. The man keeps bragging about opinion polls that show him beating Hillary, and though he may be wrong, we can’t be sure. He has defied the pundits so far.
Just think, my liberal chums. All that power in the hands of a man self-absorbed almost to the point of clinical narcissism, a man who recognizes no constraints whatever, a man who is convinced that he alone speaks for the real America. Worried? Well, maybe now you’ll start to understand what we’ve been banging on about for all these years.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
