Tearing Leviathan Apart

Authored by Ned Ryun and Mark Corallo via American Greatness,

The time has come to end the Administrative State once and for all.

This failed experiment launched a century ago by Progressive Statists like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt is a deeply unconstitutional approach to government that is antithetical to the free, representative government founded by the American Republic. It is the polar opposite of what our founders envisioned with the unelected bureaucrats doing the governing of the country while not responsive to “We the People,” as the people didn’t elect them and, more importantly, don’t have any recourse to redress their grievances against the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Administrative State via its statutes and regulations that benefit the State and its allies.

The good news is that President Trump has fully empowered Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is a massive step in the right direction. The fundamental reason for this is: Trump rejects the premise that the Administrative State is legitimate or that its unelected bureaucrats should be the final decision makers on anything, whether foreign or domestic policy. But Trump and DOGE should not settle for reducing government spending and the regulatory burden.

Its goal should be to shatter the Administrative State into a million pieces.

Everything that is wrong with our government and country today in many ways stems from the Administrative State: out of control bureaucracy, insane spending, and really the Swamp writ large. Understand that the foundation of the Swamp is the State. If you want to drain the Swamp you must break the State. Not only will it fix many of the ills facing America today, it will put the country back on the path of restoring the free American Republic and balancing out the three branches of government once more, which will lead to greater freedom and a Golden Age for this country.

But for this to happen, several fundamental, practical things must take place.

First, on Day 1 of his second term, Trump must fire via his Reduction in Force authority 200,000 federal employees, preferably at the GS-12 and 13 levels. Of course the federal employee unions, which should cease to exist, will sue for a stay. That case will likely wind its way through the courts for 18 months or so (unless the Supreme Court fast tracks it). But once it reaches the SCOTUS, the fundamental question to be asked is: can the head of the Executive Branch, the duly elected President of the US, hire or fire whoever he pleases as per the Constitution? Or do the extra Constitutional statutes and regulations protecting the civil servants supersede the Constitution? With this SCOTUS, the odds are they will side with the originalism of the Constitution and give the President the right to hire and fire whoever he pleases inside the Executive Branch, where most of the Administrative State resides.

Then Trump becomes the Demolition Man for at least the last two years of his Administration: firing large swaths of the federal government and shutting down departments and agencies. Most importantly in that process, removing those positions from the federal rolls and imploding the buildings he’s emptied and building a Freedom Park (or parks) over the top. Perhaps he even creates the monument he envisioned in July of 2020 and places the statues of our great American heroes over the remains of the Administrative State.

It’s imperative that the DOGE not be just be a cost cutting and regulatory slashing initiative, although that would be reason enough considering the massive bloat, waste, fraud and abuse in the system. This is about reminding the career bureaucrats they answer to the people through their elected officials. These bureaucrats have for too long usurped the power of the sovereign people and due to the government employee union contracts are not answerable to the elected officials from whom they derive their power. They have become a de facto, independent, unaccountable, fourth branch of government that appears nowhere in the United States Constitution. They are, in fact, the very top-down, authoritarian ruling elite our forefathers rejected in 1776 and replaced in the triumph of the American Revolution.

Now as the entire process of answering the fundamental question of President Trump’s ability to hire and fire could take well over a year, what is to be done in the short term with the high level federal employees who plan on resisting Trump’s agenda? Trump should create the federal government equivalent of the New York City school system’s “rubber room.”

On Day 1 of his Administration, the GS-15s and SES types, which by the way will likely include Biden political appointees who have “burrowed” into various departments and agencies as civil servants, will report to an empty government building dubbed the Department of Elimination, 30 minutes from Capitol Hill; far enough away to make it painful.

They will report there promptly every day to sit at empty desks for 8 hours until SCOTUS addresses the fundamental question. Then, as the Administration proceeds, any high level bureaucrat caught resisting will be immediately reassigned to the Department of Elimination “rubber room.” They won’t be fired. They just get to sit there and not have the ability to resist inside the various departments and agencies.

It’s time to use the political power given to Trump by the American people to restore the Republic. In 1911 Woodrow Wilson, shortly before taking the White House and erecting the Administrative State, declared, “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. We are as free as they were to make or unmake governments.” Trump should have that exact same mentality: we are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the founders of the Administrative State. We are as free as they were to unmake governments and by God, we must do it: we must break the shackles of the bureaucratic statism holding us down — the future happiness and freedom of generations yet to come depend on it.

Break the State. Drain the Swamp. Restore the Republic.

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Originally Posted at; https://www.zerohedge.com//

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30