Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  Trump has the persona of a business executive, but he’s no authoritarian president. He champions the free market and presided over criminal justice reform. Even his occasional implementation of tariffs on international trade is more a tactic for rectifying unfair trade deals than a function of some philosophical opposition to free trade. The left, by contrast, is dedicated to expanding government to impose their ideas on the people, though they always find a seductive moral cause oozing with sufficient urgency to justify government encroachments on our liberties.

  It’s not that a majority of rank-and-file Democrats are part of a sophisticated conspiracy to upend the established order in the United States, though leading activists, academics, and many Democratic Party leaders do have such intentions. Many left-leaning Americans, especially younger ones, don’t remotely understand some of the ideas they support, such as socialism, and what their implementation would really mean. They are simply caught up in promoting a “noble” cause. They serve as foot soldiers for policies that produce results exactly opposite of their stated intention and ultimately lead to impoverishment, slavery, and tyranny. Imbued with a sanctimonious sense of self-worth, they look down on their political opponents and are stubbornly impervious to reason.

  Sometimes Democratic officials grossly abuse their power to advance their agendas and chill dissent. When a piece in the New Yorker accused former Fox executive Ken LaCorte of spiking the Stormy Daniels story to protect Trump, some House Democrats demanded to know why Fox News didn’t rat out Trump prior to the 2016 election. LaCorte adamantly denied the story, insisting it lacked corroboration and that Fox was just exercising responsible journalistic practices, as did other outlets. But House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings demanded that a former Fox reporter produce documents about Trump’s alleged affairs, reportedly seeking information that could be used to review Fox’s editorial decisions.8 What’s almost as ominous about Cummings’s attempt to oversee the conservative media is the left’s myopic fantasy that Fox is more a threat to political liberty than the cadre of leftist mainstream media outlets.

  “THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE IS NOT SIMPLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL; IT IS ANTI-CONSTITUTIONAL”

  The left seeks to undermine freedom as understood by the framers, who sought to establish a government that maximizes personal liberties. The government was to be just powerful enough to establish and maintain civil society under the rule of law and to protect the people from domestic and foreign threats, but not strong enough to quash the people’s liberty.

  The left’s increasingly authoritarian bent, however, threatens our founding principles. To protect individual liberties, the framers incorporated limitations on government power in our constitutional framework. They divided power between the national, state, and local governments pursuant to the doctrine of federalism; adopted the Bill of Rights to guarantee specific individual liberties; and granted Congress enumerated powers. They separated federal power among three branches of government, each of which would operate as a check on the overreaches and usurpations of the others. In The Federalist No. 47, James Madison wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

  The age-old doctrine that prohibits undue delegation of powers by the legislative branch—based on the framers’ vision of government by consent of the governed—has eroded with the expansion of the administrative state. Congress has increasingly abdicated its authority to administrative agencies, often by enacting skeletal laws with the meat to be provided by agencies, such as with Obamacare. The agencies frequently overreach, as when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seeks to compel religious organizations to provide and subsidize birth control or when the Environmental Protection Agency exerts authority over private land under the Clean Water Act.9

  Leftists, despite their professed fealty to “democracy,” have long advocated delegating enormous powers to the vast administrative state. One major reason the people elected Trump was to wrest control from this unaccountable “branch” of government and return it to the people. Trump has honored his mandate by repealing administrative regulations at a record pace, bit by bit restoring the sovereignty of the American people—the exact opposite of the actions of a tyrannical dictator.

  The separation-of-powers doctrine has steadily eroded, with certain branches usurping the power of others or delegating power they should retain. The proliferation of the administrative state has also greatly diminished the separation of powers. “The administrative state is not simply unconstitutional; it is anti-constitutional,” writes William Turton. “In its structure and operation, it represents a system of government that cannot be reconciled with constitutional government. In effect, the modern administrative state destroys the separation of powers by uniting all the powers of government in its hands.”10

  This directly contradicts the Constitution’s design. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution provides, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” Article II, Section 1 provides, “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Article III, Section 1 provides, “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

  America’s administrative state was spawned by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA), which resulted in major delegations of legislative powers to executive agencies manned by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. The APA established guidelines for the rulemaking power of administrative agencies. The courts’ review of actions and rulemaking by the agencies is limited. Only if an agency acts arbitrarily and capriciously or beyond the scope of its authority can the courts strike down the offending rules or regulations.

  Over time, through legislative negligence or apathy and the power-grabbing nature of these agencies, power has increasingly shifted from the legislative branch to administrative agencies. Though they are in the executive branch, they have often crippled the president’s executive authority. When conservatives refer to the “deep state” today, they are not just referring to the coordinated effort of establishment politicians to take down President Trump but also to the entrenched bureaucracy in the plethora of administrative agencies, which are often led and staffed by career leftists hell-bent on advancing their agenda with as little oversight or accountability as possible.

  Most administrative rules are never challenged, and even when they are the courts will often defer to the agency’s discretion under the “arbitrary and capricious” standard, which means that increasing power is wielded by this unelected bureaucracy instead of by the people’s duly elected representatives in Congress. The EPA’s issuance of carbon emission standards is another example, as they dramatically impact consumers, contrary to the will of the people. This vast administrative state is eroding America’s constitutional order by replacing representative democracy with rule by unelected “experts.”11

  WINNING AT ANY COST

  The framers believed in natural rights—that our rights derive from God, not government, and are therefore unalienable. The Constitution and Bill of Rights codify this foundational principle. Progressives effectively reject the notion of natural rights, believing our rights derive from the state—a principle that underlies their efforts to make citizens dependent on government. Just as progressives believe that all revenues are the property of the government and income producers are entitled only to that portion the government, in its beneficence, decides not to tax, they believe the people have only those rights that government confers on them. It’s a radical inversion of the social compact the framers envisioned and established. Over the years, this shift in understanding has resulted in an assault on limited government
and the expansion of the state.

  Above all, progressives intend to advance their agenda and nothing, including the Constitution, shall impede their efforts. If they can’t get a majority in Congress to enact their policies, they turn to activist courts, lawless executive orders, or administrative rules and regulations. If these don’t work, they’ll seek to circumvent constitutional provisions with end-around remedies in the various states, such as efforts to neuter the Electoral College indirectly which we will examine below.

  On a more basic level—elections—they’ll interfere with the voting process by suppressing votes, enabling voter fraud, and divining favorable votes from hanging chads—all while accusing Republicans of doing the very things they’re doing. They oppose voter ID laws on the specious and patronizing ground that it’s racist to require African Americans to furnish identification at polling places. Yet a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms that voter ID laws don’t suppress election turnout.12 Upon losing the 2000 presidential election, Democrats employed an army of lawyers to confuse the system and reverse the results through an intricate scheme of deceit. When the Supreme Court put an end to their charade, they accused Republicans of stealing the election that they had tried, unsuccessfully, to steal themselves. Similarly, when gobsmacked by Trump’s election, Democrats tried to force him from office through false allegations that he colluded with Russia to steal the election. All the while, they were trying to steal the election themselves.

  Opposing voter ID laws was just the beginning of the left’s ongoing assault against the integrity of ballots. “A lot of you know about voter ID,” said former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams. “But that’s yesterday’s issue and it is 10 years old. Voter ID is not the solution; the left has moved on.… The next battle space is alien registration,” which involves illegal immigrants acquiring driver’s licenses that enable them to become registered voters.13 This concern about noncitizens voting is no mere theoretical problem. For example, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton announced that some 95,000 non–U.S. citizens were registered to vote in his state and almost 58,000 of them had voted in one or more Texas elections. The New York Times spuriously downplayed this, saying that even if all these noncitizens had voted they would have represented only 0.69 percent of the total votes cast. “That’s one way to put it—if you want to obscure the significance of 58,000 fraudulent votes!” writes Margot Cleveland. “After all, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in Florida by a mere 537 votes to become our 43rd president.”14

  A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC OR MOB RULE?

  In January 2019, Democratic congressman Steve Cohen introduced a bill to eliminate the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the president and vice president. It’s certainly any congressman’s prerogative to propose a bill to start the constitutional amendment process, but Cohen knew he couldn’t pull that off, so he attempted an end run with a National Popular Vote (NPV) bill. This pernicious measure would call upon states to sign a contract agreeing to pledge their presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote rather than the winner of their state’s popular vote. If all states honored this dubious commitment, all presidential elections would be unanimous because every state would have to pledge its electors to the winner of the national popular vote, meaning all 535 electors would go to the winner. In addition to this being a shameless fraud on the constitutional system, does anyone believe that deep-blue states would honor their “contractual” obligations if a Republican—let’s say, Donald Trump—won the national popular vote?

  Such an arrangement would diminish the sovereignty of the states under the current, decentralized system of fifty-one separate elections (including the District of Columbia, which is governed by its own separate laws). Under the present system, only the voters of a certain state can choose the electors for that state. Under the NPV, that would change. The NPV could also lead to the centralization of voting rules, reducing safeguards that protect the integrity of the election process, such as laws concerning voter registration, early voting, absentee ballots, the voting of felons, election contests, and recounts—most or all of which are governed by state law. Obviously, the NPV would also result in candidates prioritizing urban areas over rural ones—a primary concern that led the founders to devise the Electoral College.15

  The clear impetus behind the NPV is that Democrats believe it would help them win more elections than they do with the Electoral College. They’re showing contempt for the fundamental structure of our government, which no longer serves their political interests. The Electoral College system has effectuated the framers’ intent to check the potential tyranny of the majority by rejecting the election of presidents by direct or popular vote. The system has reduced voter fraud, promoted coalition building, and empowered small as well as large states.

  As opponents of direct democracy, the framers created a constitutional republic—and their wisdom has been vindicated, especially if one compares the American Revolution to the French Revolution, which led to frenzied mob rule and eventually the guillotine, a device that was ultimately used on some of the revolutionaries themselves.

  The framers believed that a constitutional republic would provide greater stability by insulating the government from mob rule by passion-inflamed citizens. Today’s Democratic leadership seeks to weaken those safeguards through a seductive message that appeals to voters’ emotions. “Most of the Founding Fathers believed that a diffuse democracy would weaken the ability of politicians to scaremonger and rely on emotional appeals to take power,” writes columnist David Harsanyi. “… Democrats agree, which is why they want to scrap the system.… Democrats prefer a system in which politicians who promise the most free stuff to the largest number of people win. Because they can’t admit it, we have to wrestle with preposterous arguments in favor of overturning the Electoral College. The most absurd is the notion that in a direct democracy, every vote ‘counts.’ ”16

  The left, with its 1984-style penchant for erasing history, is distorting the legacy of the Electoral College. For example, CNN fraudulently intimated that James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, opposed the system when he was instrumental in creating it. CNN has also suggested that the Electoral College was created to perpetuate slavery, a notion that has been thoroughly discredited by history professor Allen Guelzo. Among other points, Guelzo notes that the Electoral College played a crucial role in ending slavery, since it allowed Abraham Lincoln to become president after winning 40 percent of the popular vote. Guelzo further offers this ringing defense of the founders’ brilliant presidential election system:

  The Electoral College was designed by the framers deliberately, like the rest of the Constitution, to counteract the worst human impulses and protect the nation from the dangers inherent in democracy. The Electoral College is neither antiquated nor toxic; it is an underappreciated institution that helps preserve our constitutional system, and it deserves a full-throated defense.… This is, after all, a constitutional republic, and even the most casual reader of the Constitution cannot fail to notice that the Electoral College is the only method specified by that document for selecting the president of the United States. For all the reverence paid to the popular vote in presidential elections, the Constitution says not a word about holding a popular vote for presidents.17

  Though the system is not purely democratic, it ensures that the government reflects the will of the people, who determine the states’ electoral votes.

  OTHER DEMOCRATIC SCHEMES TO STEAL POWER

  Democrats are also looking at extra-constitutional gambits to reduce the voting age and pack the Supreme Court. In March 2019, a majority of House Democrats voted to lower the federal voting age from eighteen to sixteen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the measure would stimulate voter engagement and students’ interest in politics. “I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 16,” said Pelosi. “I think it’s really important to capture kids whe
n they’re in high school, when they’re interested in all of this, when they’re learning about government, to be able to vote.”18

  Pelosi’s offhand remark about capturing kids has an ominous ring. Prudent adults surely don’t believe children of that age possess the wisdom to vote, but calculating adults realize they can be manipulated. After all, the utopian, compassionate-sounding Democratic message seductively appeals to immature minds ripe for indoctrination. This illustrates the stark difference between knowledge and wisdom.

  The sudden embrace of this proposal by the Democratic Speaker of the House is jarring. Just a few years ago only one member of Congress expressed serious interest in this idea. But Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley then took up the cause, citing teenage activists who pushed gun control and making spurious comparisons with driver’s licenses. When Pressley introduced it in 2019 as an amendment to the For the People Act,19 lowering the voting age to sixteen garnered 126 votes, including 125 Democrats.20 It is inconceivable that even liberal Democrats truly believe it is prudent to let sixteen-year-old kids vote—unless you define as prudent anything that increases Democrats’ chances of winning. Yet a majority of them supported the amendment. The common thread in all these system-altering proposals is that they are calculated to enhance Democrats’ election prospects. They reject timeworn wisdom in pursuit of political power—a choice with ominous consequences.

  The For the People Act is Nancy Pelosi’s signature bill. It would overhaul federal election laws to micromanage the election process now administered by the states and centralize the process to favor Democrats. The Heritage Foundation says the bill would interfere “with the ability of states and their citizens to determine qualifications for voters, to ensure the accuracy of voter registration rolls, to secure the integrity of elections, to participate in the political process, and to determine the district boundary lines for electing their representatives.”