There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand. Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion. The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency. When James Madison and the other Framers fashioned a new constitutional structure in the wake of the failure of the Articles of Confederation they envisioned a vastly different government. Under the federalism model, states would be the dominant system with most of the revenue and responsibilities of governance. The federal government was virtually microsoptic by today’s standards. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies. [These numbers can be themselves misleading since much federal work is now done by contractors as part of downsizing but the work of the agencies has continued to expand. Moreover, technological advances have increased the reach of this workforce]. dailysoapbox-mydailysoapbox.blogspot/2014/06/constitutional-attorney-jonathan-turley.html
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 01:46:32 +0000
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