Joy Pullmann of the Federalist asks readers to consider the true source of today’s constitutional challenges.
Democrats claim we’re in a constitutional crisis because President Trump believes — and acts on the belief — that the executive should control the executive branch. It is a crisis their party has forced on Americans for the last 125 years.
It was the Democrat Party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson who designed an administrative state to be unaccountable to voters and to ultimately swallow the original Constitution. Constitutional scholars have described this situation as the United States functioning under “two constitutions” — the original, and a competing system of government under Progressives’ “living constitution.” We’re about to see which one will win this very long march through American law and culture.
In the recent election, Americans declared their allegiance to the original U.S. Constitution by electing, by historic margins, a man who promised to uphold it. But simply declaring allegiance does not erase the illegitimate “constitution” that runs Washington, D.C. We are in the early stages of a new front in this longstanding American cold civil war.
The American founders would have called it slavery to force Americans to work to pay for a massive, debt-ridden, counterproductive, and unconstitutional administrative state that majorities of Americans kept voting to restrain by electing Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump. Throughout the last century, even when Americans voted to limit the bureaucracy, they somehow kept getting more bureaucracy.
As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in Age of Entitlement, Reagan’s presidency was a prime example of this dynamic. He promised to cut government while it expanded. Voters elected him to do this key thing, and they got the opposite of what they voted for.
Because this cancer has advanced so far, Trump may be the last president who can wrestle down the administrative state instead of merely acting as its puppet. He’s certainly giving it the WWE treatment.
