things are moving very fast in Washington, DC, and now it looks like President Trump and Congress are coming together to advance education freedom for all students. As Congress moves through its budget reconciliation process and President Trump seeks to close the Federal Department of Education, they should remain focused on ensuring educational freedom for all students. They’re hearing from all sides that they shouldn’t close it at all, but they need to remain focused. The public school system is controlled by government bureaucrats and teachers unions, while the actions of union officials don’t reflect the views of many teachers, the unions often promote policies that are not in the best interest of children. This has been going on a long time, so long that Apple founder Steve Jobs had said in quotes, the unions are the worst thing that happened to education, because it is not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible. End Quote, The American Federation of Teachers aft as their known and the National Education Association, NEA, we all know them as they’re closely aligned with the hard left in American politics. In 2016 for instance, the aft adopted a stand with Planned Parenthood resolution in support of the nation’s largest abortion provider, the NEA Oh, they advocated for, in quotes, social and educational strategies fostering the eradication of institutional racism and white privilege perpetuated by white supremacy culture. Really, end quote, really. This is the ideology that underpins this push for divisive, critical race theory indoctrination in our K through 12 schools and in our colleges across America. This is what’s ending. You know what? During the COVID spring of 2020, and the next school year, teachers union set a very high bar for reopening schools. It could not go to school in person, our little kids in only some districts, the ones controlled by these unions. This subordinated the needs of children who suffered emotionally, socially, academically, because they were absent from that in person school during that period, and it really disproportionately impacted poor children in our country, a strong majority of American people believe parents should be able to designate tax dollars to send their children to the public, private and or home school of their choice. Black, white and Hispanic Americans are nearly identical in this view, with a 2023 poll finding 71% support from the American people. We know that the key to the success of our American economy is freedom and competition. Competition is what produces excellence. And how can it be that in the sphere where excellence is possibly the most important value more important than anywhere else, the education of our children. We don’t have any freedom. We don’t have any competition. Ideally, federal education funds should be block, granted to the States with instructions that they need to provide on an equal basis for public school, private school, home school, whatever the parent thinks is best for their child. That would enable President Trump to close the Department of Education and for Congress to enable parents in all 50 states to choose the best educational opportunity for their children. Educational freedom and equal opportunity for all American children is a moral and national imperative, so Congress and President Trump should seize this chance to make this happen. The time to do it is now. I.

The school choice is still expanding, and for good reason. Wyoming, Governor Mark Gordon is the latest to sign a bill giving parents school vouchers to cover every single school kid. New Hampshire’s legislature is advancing a similar bill. 15 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Ohio have passed universal school choice in the past four years, and it’s no wonder, when you look at what the public schools have been up to, nobody blames the public schools for closing in March 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic hit and everyone was afraid, but then the big school districts refused to reopen six months later, in places like Chicago and the suburbs of DC, the teachers unions protested against reopening in 2021 the unions made it clear that they didn’t value instruction and that the whole idea of a neighborhood school was a tall tale they didn’t really believe.

Also, public school systems all became ideologically extreme, they reorganized their instruction around critical race theory, and they adopted gender ideology, besides distracting from actual learning, these far left ideas had a common thread. They both pit school systems against parents. Critical Race Theory and dei are both based on the idea that America is fundamentally racist and that schools must uproot all tradition and existing institutions in order to uproot this deep seated white supremacy. Gender ideology in schools is about convincing a child that he or she is a different person, that who you are is determined solely by you.

Large school districts typically have policies that teachers may not tell parents if their child is beginning to identify as transgendered and the propaganda on sex is intense in Montgomery County, Maryland, the school system wanted to include in the curriculum books featuring transgenderism and sexual fetishes and show it to all the kids. But state law allowed parents to opt their kids out of sex ed, so the school system moved the sexual books into the reading curriculum when religious parents objected, school board members called them bigots. These school systems want to tear children away from their parents. The schools see themselves as the Enlightened liberators, freeing the next generation from their backwards, racist parents.

This ideology obviously endangers children in Arlington, Virginia County, officials allowed a registered sex offender who had recently been arrested for exposing himself to enter a girl’s locker room at a pool shared with a public high school because the man identified as a woman, and this was county policy. Look around the country and you will find 1000 stories like these. Soon you realize that the public schools have become, in effect, religious schools, preaching a harmful new religion, and these school systems try to insulate themselves from parents and the community.

Notably, the insanity happens the most in the big school districts, where the school boards are most immune from accountability and democracy. When parents speak up, they get branded as domestic terrorists. In this context, state governments have a duty to help parents opt out of these far left quasi religious schools. The best way to do this is to create universal school choice, and here’s hoping the trend continues. 

One of the things about the Congress at a time of dramatic change is that there’s always the next thing you have to get done. The house just passed its version of the budget, a very narrow vote. Was real cliffhanger that’s now in the Senate, but now they have to work to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open so it doesn’t shut down. You do that when you haven’t passed all the appropriations bills, and in recent years, we’ve never had all the appropriations bills passed on time. And the challenge is simple.

If you make it conservative enough to get all the Republican votes, you can’t get the Democrats to vote for it, and in the house, we only have a one or two or three vote margin. On the Republican side, you can’t afford to lose anybody. And there are usually 10 or 15 or 20 people who hate voting for a debt ceiling. They hate voting for continuing resolutions. And so you’ve got to gradually win them over, one by one by one. Now to make it even more interesting, there’s talk now that they may take the savings from the Department of government efficiency and wrap them into this bill, and turn them into legislation so that they would actually have 50 or 100 or 100 and $20 billion in savings as part of the bill. The challenge for Speaker Johnson is you can’t really deal with the Democrats, because they’ll charge so much that he’ll lose most of his own base, and he might lose President Trump, on the other hand, if he’s going to pass it with only Republican votes, he literally can’t afford to lose more than one person and as you’ll remember, when they got around to passing the budget, he got within three votes of having a majority, given that he was one person, he was never going to get. Those three votes weren’t available, and until President Trump called them, personally, talked to them and got them to agree to vote yes, this could easily go the same way, but in order to avoid a government shutdown, it has to go through in a form that the Senate can adopt. And the Senate has a different set of problems these. This requires 60 votes, and I suspect the Senate is going to have to find some way to accommodate some Democrats at that point,

the question would be, if it came back, having been more spending, or whatever the Democrats cost, will they be able to get votes in the House? These kind of sort of cliffhanger events, almost like the old fashioned Saturday morning shorts, where people wondered whether or not the heroin would be saved or what’s going to happen? Will the hero arrive in time? That’s kind of what they’re going through. And Mike Johnson, who has shown just enormous endurance, is back once again. He wins one vote turns around, and 24 hours later, he’s working on the next vote. Hopefully in a few weeks, they’ll have special elections in Florida. They’ll pick up two Republican seats, and at that point his majority will be a little bit bigger. But you go from three to five, that’s really a narrow, difficult challenge. If I had to bet the government will not shut down, President Trump probably will intervene at the last minute, and they will get just enough votes. The bigger challenge, I think, is going to be the Senate, because of the rules of the Senate are different, and it’s virtually impossible for majority leader Thune to get this through only on Republican votes, so he’s going to have to find some way to get some Democrats to agree. Then that’s going to go back to the house. Then it gets a little bit more challenging. So stay tuned. This is not over. It’s not obvious, and I think that in many ways, it’s a it’s a very, very serious challenge

In last week’s commentary I talked about the two-fold constitutional crisis the Trump administration is facing: 

One from the unelected and unaccountable administrative state, which seeks to rule over us instead of doing our bidding by faithfully serving the president we elect; and the other from a judiciary engaged in radical overreach such that it threatens the executive branch and our constitutional order itself.

That crisis came to a head this week at the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision at least temporarily embracing corrosive judicial supremacy.

“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” Justice Alito asked, in connection with the decision.

“The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’” Alito replied – in a blistering dissent joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh – “but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

The associate justice was referring to the Court’s unwillingness to overturn D.C. District Judge Amir Ali’s temporary restraining order – a generally non-appealable directive – requiring that the Trump administration disburse State Department and USAID funds frozen during a 90-day review period and allegedly owed not only the case’s ten plaintiffs, but all foreign-aid and grant recipients — $2 billion within 36 hours.

There are just a few problems with that ruling, beyond the primary question about whether the president has the authority to pause contracts and withhold payments while it reviews them for fraud and abuse; beyond the fact that the judge effectively ordered a preliminary injunction which is appealable; and beyond the fact the order doesn’t just enjoin the presidential policy with respect to the plaintiffs – freezing the pause on the review of their foreign assistance contracts and/or grants – but that it does so for everyone everywhere in a nationwide injunction while mandating the administration make $2 billion in payments almost immediately.

Even more fundamentally, at core this can be seen as a contract dispute. Such disputes are dealt with in the Court of Federal Claims, not in district courts.

“A federal court has many tools to address a party’s supposed nonfeasance,” Justice Alito wrote. “Self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction is not one of them.”

Yet, perturbed, he added “Today, the Court makes a most unfortunate misstep that

rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”

The Court did so by not reversing the lower court’s order. Instead, it merely asked the judge to “clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.”

Justice Alito’s colleagues, namely Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have called on the court to consider whether universal injunctions are legal – a position endorsed, ironically, by the Biden administration. Alito called on the Court to consider clarifying the standards for distinguishing between a non-appealable temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction.

The Court seems to be moving deliberately – at best letting the lower courts err until the cases sufficiently ripen to be smacked down.

But in the interim our constitutional order is under attack.

So some are calling for action outside the Courts.

House Judiciary Committee Republicans last week passed a bill that would curtail universal injunctions, ticketing it for the House floor.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley suggested in floor remarks that he would be open to considering such legislation.

House Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against some of the left-wing judges engaged in apparent overreach and activism.

Several congressman launched a Judicial Activism Accountability Task Force aimed at “exposing judicial activism, with the ultimate goal of impeaching rogue, activist judges,” one member said.

Some activists have also proposed ideas like reducing the power of the progressive-dominated D.C. District Court – where many cases dealing with administrations are brought – by modifying its authorities it to focus on local D.C. crimes, and to offset the $2 billion in foreign assistance funding in the case that incensed Justice Alito by reducing the federal judiciary’s budget by that same amount.

The White House also issued a memorandum last week proposing a unique way to curtail what it considers frivolous lawsuits seeking injunctions that halt administration actions.

It calls on all agencies to request of federal courts that under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), plaintiffs be made to post injunction bonds – to “require plaintiffs post security equal to the federal government’s potential costs and damages from a wrongly issued preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order,” according to a fact sheet.

The idea is that this will deter illegitimate lawsuits by raising the risk for those bringing them.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court may rise to the occasion and defend our constitutional order.

The question is how much damage its willing to let be done to the presidency, the judiciary, and the republic in the interim.

Medicaid is a poverty trap that needs reform, and yes, the reforms are being discussed now in Washington, DC, following some drama in the House of Representatives and personal intervention by President Trump with some of the wavering House members, the House passed a budget resolution, passed by the narrowest of margins, I might add, but that now has to be reconciled with the different piece of legislation that’s in the Senate.

This legislation, their legislation coming together. One of the ironies is that we discussed these things before. One of the thorny issues going forward is going to be the vastly expanded and increasingly expensive Medicaid program. Despite warnings from fiscally responsible people that Congress could not long sustain a 90% federal match for states that expanded their Medicaid programs to include many able bodied people without children, many governors and state legislators succumbed to the political pressure and they massively expanded their Medicaid programs. And we told them then that this would not work over time, Obamacare was not good for the country.

Well, now members of Congress from the Medicaid expanded states are objecting to the idea that Medicaid costs need to be restrained and states need to assume more responsibility for accomplishing that objective. In an essay for the state of black progress, it’s a policy tome that was published by the organization that I founded, the Center for Urban renewal and education. Sally pipes, a doctor and the president of Pacific Research Institute, notes in that tome that the so called Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, funneled many poor people out of private insurance and into Medicaid, with its notorious wait times, Medicaid was already a disaster before they included expansions in Obamacare and once on Medicaid, people face a disincentive to earn enough money to escape from it because of the high marginal tax rate.

As beneficiaries’ income increase, their benefits decrease, they’re caught in a welfare trap which has turned many poor people, especially black people, into wards of the state. And another essay in the state of black progress Galen Institute, President Grace Marie Turner contrasts the efficacy of private versus public health insurance and suggests that the Medicaid program has obstructed black advancement we knew it would, and now it has a significantly higher percentage of blacks than whites are saddled with government health insurance, where they receive worse care and suffer long, long, long wait times.

Turner also explains how government policies create hurdles for medical improvements in such procedures as kidney dialysis, where innovations would benefit many poor people, again, being wards of the government is not beneficial to black people. Many states have devised means to game the Medicaid system to get higher levels of reimbursement. Talk about fraud. Yes, it’s there. It was perceived to going to be there, and now it is there.

And now the Congress is saying we’ve got to do something about this program that was forced down the American people’s throats. Sally pipe suggests that dispersing Medicaid funds to states as block grants would require states to manage their programs in a more disciplined fashion and enable them to save beneficiaries from falling into that poverty trap. We need to have this discussion, and I think that the senators and the House members need to reconcile themselves to the fact that we told them.

So, and this could not go on longer, and cannot continue the way that it is pipe says that we should be working to help people improve their economic station, to create opportunities for them to purchase private insurance on their own and to secure coverage through work. That’s better for taxpayers and individuals. That’s what she says, and I concur. So right now, in the sausage of Washington, DC, Medicaid is on the chopping block and should be.

No one should underestimate the importance of the one vote victory in the house for the budget resolution. The fact is, the House Republicans have a very, very narrow majority. In fact, they can only afford to lose one Republican, and that Republican congressman, Massey of Kentucky, doesn’t listen to anybody. He has a self righteous sense that only his view matters, and even President Trump can’t talk to him or reason with him. So when they lost him, which they knew they would, they could not afford to lose a single member of the House Republican Party. Now I’ve been Speaker of the House for four years, and I know how challenging it is to pull together the party, but I never had a margin that close. And my respect for and admiration for Speaker Mike Johnson, is boundless. He has the patience, the calmness. He listens, he tries to understand every member, and he got almost there by himself. He was within three votes of a majority, and finally, he didn’t see how he was going to get there that night, and so he said, I guess we won’t vote tonight. And people began to leave. And then 10 minutes later, President Trump had intervened. He called the three people who were still out. All three said, All right, we’ll find a way to do it. And they called everyone back, and suddenly they passed the budget. Now it mattered for this reason, the house had stuck with President Trump on one big, beautiful bill, which is President Trump’s description. So everything is in this reconciliation bill, the tax cuts, the spending cuts, the reforms, the energy policy, everything we need for the border, all of it’s in one bill. The Senate Republicans didn’t want to go that route. They wanted to do all the easy stuff first and then come back later and do the really vital economic things, which I think would frankly cripple the Republican Party in the 2026 election. So this, they were confident the house couldn’t pass this, and I suspect it was a huge shock to them when, in fact, between them, President Trump and Speaker Johnson, found the votes and got it through. Now this is the beginning of the process, after you pass a budget resolution, you have to do what’s called reconciliation. That is, you take current law and you reconcile it to the new rules that are set up under the budget. That’s going to take two or three months of very hard work, because they now have to write real, detailed things that will implement the budget resolution, but this was an enormous first step. If they had lost then I think it would have been very hard to pass the tax cuts and the energy bill and the things we need if we’re going to have a strong economy in 2026

and it’s vital for Republicans to have a stronger economy because they can’t keep the house if they have to run for re election with a weak economy. So we’ve had an amazing moment, a remarkable achievement, and I have to say, between them, President Trump and speaker Johnson made one heck of a team.

Contrary to the hysteria coming out of Washington, Donald Trump isn’t causing a constitutional crisis. 

Rather, by drawing a torrent of outrage and barrage of lawfare for daring to assert control over the executive branch that’s supposed to serve him – and by extension us – Trump has exposed a constitutional crisis a century in the making.

The crisis has two parts: The first is that despite maintaining the trappings of a republic where we elect a president and Congress to govern based on our desired agenda, America has found itself instead ruled by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who impose their own agenda through the administrative state.

The second is that judicial supremacists have effectively conspired with the bureaucrats to ensure this permanent government prevails by preventing the president from reining in and commanding the bureaucracy to make it responsive to Americans’ wishes.

The administrative state, the Democrat-dominated fourth branch of government that has combined the powers of the other three, was ground zero for The Resistance that dogged Trump I.

So, Trump II has made “deconstruction” of the Federal Leviathan, as he put it in a recent executive order, one of his foremost priorities. 

While the actions the executive has taken to control the executive branch may look revolutionary to Official Washington, contrary to the propaganda of its corporate media mouthpieces, Trump is effectuating a common-sense counterrevolution.

Like a turnaround artist taking over an ailing business, beyond laying out a comprehensive vision for restoring it to health, codified via a slew of executive orders, and rapidly installing those prepared to faithfully execute them, Trump has:

• Fired or forced out those engaged in past misconduct, bought out others likely to resist going forward, and enacted plans to downsize a government that tries to do an infinite number of things, many poorly, into one that does the most important things well.
• Weeded out zombie officials through the simple act of soliciting responses to an email calling for bureaucrats to detail five achievements from their prior work week.
• Dismissed political cases and pardoned those persecuted by a weaponized law enforcement apparatus to restore justice.
• Restructured agencies. 
• Frozen programs, policies, and associated spending for review. 
• Cancelled fraudulent and/or wasteful contracts. 
• Begun deregulating and defanging regulatory agencies.
• Empowered change agents, including those targeted by the last administration, and DOGE – essentially an elite management consultant – in conjunction with these activities.

The president has done all this consistent with his power as commander-in-chief.

He has ultimate authority over the executive branch and its personnel.

He has ultimate prosecutorial discretion.

He has ultimate responsibility to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed.

The presumption of his critics apparently is that he is supposed to serve as president-in-name-only – to beg for permission from the executive branch rather than take command of it to do our bidding.

That those impacted by his policies have thrown temper tantrums, some resisting and leaking their disdain to the press on their way out the door, others indicating they may even sell their country out to foreign powers – as CNN recently suggested regarding disgruntled outgoing CIA brass – illustrates a staggering level of entitlement, insubordination, and danger within the administrative state.

Unfortunately, the courts have perpetuated these problems by insulating the bureaucracy – at the expense not only of the agenda Americans voted for, and of the administration forced to fend off lawfare, but of the legitimacy of the courts and our constitutional order itself.

The lawfare has come in the way of a slew of cases brought by administrative staters, and their blue state and “non-governmental” champions aimed at gumming up the president’s efforts.

The arguably frivolous suits wouldn’t be so detrimental if they hadn’t been forum-shopped to some of the nearly 700 district court judges who have chosen to serve as willing accomplices in an effort to thwart the administration, and by extension violate the people’s will.

These radicals in robes have operated as if the duly elected president of the United States is their subordinate through first imposing generally unappealable temporary restraining orders, and now in some cases preliminary universal injunctions that halt legitimate presidential actions and policies not just for the benefit of those bringing the cases, but for everyone everywhere.

In so doing, individual district court judges have elevated themselves above the president, second-guessing his policies, micro-managing him, and stripping him of his authorities – even if only temporarily – by preventing him from firing his subordinates and his subordinates from accessing basic agency systems; implementing policies explicitly under his purview; and pausing programs for review, as would be prudent for anyone assuming office with a mandate for change.

Some appellate judges are blessing these moves. The Supreme Court has shown a reluctance to wade in until the relevant issues “percolate” up to it.

Courts have entertained all manner of artful justifications for damaging the executive, whether in claiming the processes by which Trump has acted are deficient, or that they imperil privacy rights – ironically in light of the silence about a government that has surveilled us all and, as we just learned, leaked the tax records of 400,000 Americans, Trump included. 

What the judges and bureaucrats are really saying is that they know better than the president, and the American people who elected him. They are substituting their wisdom for yours, the Constitution and consent of the governed be damned.

For this reason, the fight between Trump on the one side, and the administrative state and courts and the other, is much bigger than him.

It’s about whether we will have a republic. 

One as he emerged from America’s first constitutional convention in 1787, dr, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman, well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy? Franklin famously replied, a republic, if you can keep it, yes, our Republic is a representative form of government that is ruled according to a constitution. Now, while actions are ultimately decided by a majority of representatives, our system has mechanisms that protect the rights of all including the minority. We also have three branches of government that we need to constantly remind ourselves of, especially the students today, the legislative, the executive and the judicial, and these serve as checks and balances so that one branch cannot absorb the power of the other co equal branches. We really need to remind ourselves that this system naturally produces tension, but it has endured, and next year, we will celebrate our nation’s 250th

birthday, our legislative process has been compared to the sausage factory. So it’s not pleasant to watch. It’s messy and it’s chaotic, but it ultimately produces results, and the Republic endures. The first month of the Trump administration has been very productive, but there has also been a lot of chaos. Things have been chaotic in Congress, especially in the House of Representatives, but the sausage factory is grinding forward. We’re in trouble, and they’re trying to fix us as a country. The Senate has passed a budget resolution, the first step in providing funds for the border security, funds for energy development, funds for national security, and they are proposing to offset these expenditures and to pass a second budget resolution to facilitate extensions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. We need those and enact even some new tax reductions that President Trump proposed during his campaign. It’s really getting sloppy. It’s getting really tense, but the house is pushing one big, beautiful bill to advance all these objectives and to achieve deficit reduction. Is what the people voted for, is what they’re trying to do. And ultimately, the House and the Senate will need to pass the same budget resolution or two budget resolutions, and it’s likely to be really messy getting into that result. Budget resolutions are like blueprints, so they are just the first step in the process. Don’t be moved by the mainstream media that’s trying to confuse everybody. There are going to be points of contention as the details of the final budget reconciliation bill emerges and it’s going to contain particular spending and deficit reduction measures as well as the details of new and continuing tax policies, we’ve got to get our house in order as Congress wrestles with their budget resolutions and budget reconciliation measures, they also need to continue annual appropriations by March 14 and address a debt ceiling that is looming on the horizon. Remember, we heard it going into Christmas. It’s looming, and now it’s time the congressional sausage factory isn’t something for the faint of heart, but it’s the product of our representative form of government, and it seems to work despite all of its flaws. As Dr Ben Franklin said, we have a republic if we can keep it.

A recent interview with Elon Musk got me to thinking about Doge, the Department of government efficiency from a totally new angle. I’ve been reading about the waste that they’re discovering, the fraud that they’re discovering. There’s no doubt that they’re going to save an enormous amount of money, maybe even as much as a trillion dollars. But as I listened to Elon Musk explain his thinking, I realized that there was an even bigger, deeper impact that Doge was going to have. You know, many years ago, in 1952 President Harry Truman said of General Eisenhower poor Ike, when he gets in here as a president, he’s going to think that when he issues in order something’s going to happen, because in the army, orders are followed up and people inspect to see that you do it. But in the civilian government, he said, Truman said,

I signed something, and it may or may not happen, I have no ability to go out and track it. And it reminded me of a rule Senator Connie Mack taught me, that you get what you inspect, not what you expect. Well, what Elon Musk has done is bring in a bunch of really smart young people who really understand information technology, and what they’re doing is going through the federal government, basically monitoring whether or not President Trump’s executive orders are being implemented. And the principle that Musk is articulating, I agree with 100%

Lincoln promises government of the people by the people and for the people. And unfortunately, over the last 90 years, the Rooseveltian revolution led to huge bureaucracies surrounded by lobbyists, and we increasingly got government by bureaucrats and lobbyists, for bureaucrats and lobbyists, and of bureaucrats and lobbyists, we did not get the kind of basic, honest commitment we should have had. And you see this as the various work of musk and the doge team do all of a sudden, lots of senatorial inquiries, lots of congressional interests, they were either being blocked. People just refuse to answer, or the bureaucrats were lying. So I think the biggest impact of Doge may come in creating an ability to actually monitor the entire federal government and know whether or not the elected official, not the bureaucrat, is in charge, and know that the wishes of the American people, as expressed through the people they elect, are being implemented, or the wishes of the lobbyists and bureaucrats are being implemented. If this does work out this way, it is going to be one of the great changes in American history. It is going to return to government of by and for the people, and we will look back in later years, and be amazed at how gigantic government had become, how out of touch with the American people it had become, and what a dramatic problem it was to try to get it back under control. I must say, having watched the interview, I was more impressed with Elon Musk than ever, because he’s very smart, but he’s a real patriot, and his description of the importance d

The Trump administration is restructuring agencies, slashing regulations and axing asinine programs, but in its effort to jettison bureaucrats likely to resist the Trump agenda, the President is poised to strike at one of the administrative state’s greatest affronts to the Constitution, so called independent agencies the administrative state, consisting of offices populated with often leftist, unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats that effectively make law and even have their own courts, has over the last century, developed into a fourth branch of government. Independent agencies are perhaps the most dubious manifestation such agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC Federal Trade Commission, FTC and the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, often exert massive control through issuing rules and regulations impacting major aspects of American life. They’ve been allowed to advance critical rules and regs without presidential review. What’s more, while the members or commissioners who run these agencies are appointed by Presidents subject to senatorial confirmation and such, they often serve staggered terms, or terms longer than any one presidency. And by law, the president’s power to dismiss agency leaders is often circumscribed, hence their independence in response to the lack of accountability baked into their structure, President Trump has issued an executive order to ensure president just presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. It mandates that such agencies run their regulatory policies through the White House, and subjects them to White House Oversight of management, funding and operations, still ultimately, personnel is policy and courts is insulation of independent agency leaders from at will presidential removal has meant that the President lacks full control over personnel and therefore policy. In the wake of the Trump administration’s firings of at least one independent agency leader in recent weeks, this interpretation of presidential power is likely to be challenged. Some history is in order here in a 1926 case, Myers V us, the Supreme Court held that the power to remove appointed officers is vested in the president and the president alone. Absent that power, he could not discharge his constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be faithfully executed. Chief Justice Taft wrote for the majority, but a decade later, as the administrative state rapidly expanded and independent regulatory agencies emerged in the throes of the New Deal. The Supreme Court hemmed in the President’s removal power by upholding congressional restrictions on it. Tenure protections in FTC legislation permitted the president to remove commissioners only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, not at will. In that case, known as Humphreys executor, the court distinguished between the President’s illimitable power to remove purely executive officers and the limited power to remove those officers serving in independent agencies exercising purportedly quasi legislative andor quasi judicial powers. In recent years, the Supreme Court has hacked away at administrative state power and refused to extend independent agency protections for officers from removal beyond the 1935 precedent in a 2020 case, Selah V CFPB, the court ruled that on account of differences in the agency’s structure, partisan makeup and functions from the FTC, a president could fire the CFPB is director at will, while we do not revisit Humphreys or any other president today, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. We declined to elevate it into a free standing invitation for Congress to impose additional restrictions on the President’s Removal Authority. In a concurrence, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote that the court ought to go further and overturn Humphreys executor. He even went further. Thomas wrote that not only did the decision violate Article two’s vesting clause by extending executive powers to those beyond the reach of the executive, abrogating the President’s removal powers and eroding accountability of officers. But he wrote that, quote, The Constitution does not permit the creation of officers exercising quasi legislative and quasi judicial powers. In quasi legislative and quasi judicial agencies, no such powers or agencies exist. The Constitution sets out three branches of government and provides each with a different form of power, legislative, executive and judicial. Free floating agencies simply do not comport with this constitutional structure. Thomas concluded that continued reliance on Humphreys executor to justify the existence of independent agencies creates a serious ongoing threat to our government’s design. Leaving these unconstitutional agencies in place does not enhance this Court’s legitimacy. It subverts political accountability and threatens individual liberty we simply cannot compromise when it comes to our government structure. Today, the court does enough to resolve this case, but in the future, we should.

Consider Humphreys executor in Toto, and I hope that we will have the will to do so. The Trump Justice Department has said it will not defend the constitutionality of certain four cause removal provisions that apply to members of multi member regulatory commissions, including the FTC, NLRB and Consumer Product Safety Commission, and vowed to urge the Supreme Court to overrule Humphreys executor to the extent it conflicts with the administration’s position in a case before the Supreme Court regarding the challenge firing of the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the administration reiterated its position. Trump has also fired the chair of the NLRB, who has sued the administration over it, that case could well end up putting Humphreys executor to the test at SCOTUS Justice Thomas may well get the chance to play Humphreys executors, executioner, and with it, challenge the concept of independent agencies themselves in.