RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is rare that we get a glimpse at the guiding principles that motivate a president and his team, but White House senior adviser Stephen Bannon’s recent remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference may have provided unique insight into the Trump administration’s operations and goals.

For conservatives, it was a mixed bag. Bannon’s emphasis on economic nationalism raises concerns about autarky and statism. But as Rich Lowry observes, his pledge for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” was music to conservatives’ ears.

Regulatory sprawl and executive overreach have been the target of principled conservatives for some time. Efforts to tame the administrative state predate President Trump and even President Obama, whose proclivity for executive action has been subject of plenty of NRO commentary.

Conservative animus toward the administrative state is focused on more than just its economic costs, which come in the form of less investment and job creation. The principal objection is that it undermines the role of the legislative branch relative to the executive. As Bannon quipped: “The way the progressive left runs, if they can’t get it passed [by Congress], they’re just going to put it in some regulation.” This tendency to governance by regulation and executive rulemaking must therefore be reversed for both economic and political reasons.

What steps can the Trump administration and conservatives both agree to take toward reducing the size and scope of the administrative state? An obvious step would be to give Congress some way to review and scrutinize regulations and executive rulemaking, as has been done in other jurisdictions.

The U.S. Constitution indisputably places responsibility for lawmaking with Congress. The legislative branch promulgates and passes laws, and the president and his appointees implement and enforce them.

But that is not how the system of government has evolved. Many of the laws passed by Congress delegate authority to departments and agencies to produce rules and regulations to effectuate or administer them. These secondary or accompanying policies are sometimes called “delegated legislation,” because they have the full force of the law.

One good (or bad, depending on your perspective) example is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The 2,300-page statute covered a far-reaching set of issues — including financial instruments, executive compensation, mortgage lending, and government oversight — and established three new agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While comprehensive in its scope, the law was light on details. Federal agencies were granted considerable discretion to promulgate delegated authorities to accompany the statute, with no congressional role.

Vague drafting that agencies “may” issue rules or shall issue rules as they “determine are necessary and appropriate” give the executive branch tremendous power to define, broaden, and interpret the law. As the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth has put it: “In these cases, the agencies make the hard policy choices. They are the lawmakers.” The upshot is that, in 2016, Congress passed 211 laws and the federal government issued 3,853 rules and regulations. It is fair to say that this 18:1 ratio is not what James Madison had in mind.

Following the conventional wisdom on the Trump presidency is a little like taking a mind-altering drug while riding a roller-coaster. You know that you are being hurled up and down and around in a succession of dizzying revolutions, but somehow it doesn’t seem quite as normal an experience as that.

In the twelve or so hours after the State of the Union, the air was thick with the sound of second thoughts on the Trump presidency: The president had been “presidential.” He had spoken well, reading the teleprompter accurately, and not deviating into self-justifying asides. He had denounced bigotry and anti-Semitism. He had followed Nixon to China on immigration reform, hallelujah. His familiar themes of patriotic unity and rebuilding America were expressed in lighter and more optimistic language than in his “dark” and “divisive” Inaugural, with its grim talk of “carnage.” His tribute to the widow of the slain Navy SEAL had been an inspiring moment in an inspiring speech. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I don’t think anyone described the president as “the New Trump,” but it came pretty close to that. And this favorable impression was then reinforced by reports of polls that showed that the voters, maybe having listened to the pundits, liked it, too. One such poll showed that almost four out of every five Americans approved of the speech to varying degrees.

Politically speaking, that’s important. If the president is thought to be an impressive figure within the mainstream of presidents, so to speak, and to enjoy wide popular support, he will be in a better position to push through his political agenda.

Probably for that reason, pundits started having second thoughts about the second thoughts at around lunch time on the same day. They weren’t always the same pundits, of course. Some were responding critically to the first round of pundits who had had approving second thoughts; others were putting a more skeptical gloss on their own earlier-in-the-day approval. But the general effect was to explain that Trump’s speech had not been nearly as successful as the initial set of reactions had suggested. Not by any means. In fact, parts of it, like the curate’s egg, had been downright disgusting,

So what had produced this illusion of success? The answer that bubbled up from the collective subconscious of the punditocracy was that Trump had seemed to give a good speech because he was being compared favorably, indeed indulgently, to Trump who, as everyone knows, is impulsive, scatter-brained, given to plucking figures from the air or his last night’s television viewing, vulgar, credulous, hostile to every form of self-discipline, including logic, and wholly incapable of giving a good speech or a polished performance.

Establishment furor over the six-week-old Trump administration is growing.

Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump’s victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands such as the Pearl Harbor surprise bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The New Republic — based on no evidence — theorized that Trump could well be mentally unstable due to the effects of neurosyphilis.

Talk of removing the new president through impeachment, or opposing everything he does (the progressive “Resistance”), is commonplace. Some op-ed writers and pundits abroad have openly hoped for his violent death.

Trump is in a virtual war with the mainstream global media, the entrenched so-called deep state, the Democratic-party establishment, progressive activists, and many in the Republican party as well.

The sometimes undisciplined and loud Trump is certainly not a member of the familiar ruling cadre, which dismisses him as a crude and know-nothing upstart who should never have been elected president. (Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and served a full term, a member of either the Bush or Clinton families would have been president for 24 years of a 32-year span.)

But who, exactly, makes up these disgruntled elite classes?

In California, state planners and legislators focused on things such as outlawing plastic grocery bags while California’s roads and dams over three decades sank into decrepitude. The result is crumbling infrastructure that now threatens the very safety of the public. Powerful Californians with impressive degrees also came up with the loony and neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal immigration law through sanctuary cities.

Sophisticated Washington, D.C., economists produced budgets for the last eight years that saw U.S. debt explode from $10 trillion to nearly $19 trillion, as economic growth sank to its lowest level since the Hoover administration.

For a year, most expert pundits and pollsters smugly assured the public of a certain Hillary Clinton victory — until the hour before she was overwhelmed in the Electoral College.

Rhodes Scholar and former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lied repeatedly on national television about the Benghazi debacle.

From the fabulist former NBC anchorman Brian Williams to the disreputable reporters who turned up in WikiLeaks, there are lots of well-educated, influential, and self-assured elites who apparently cannot tell the truth or in dishonest fashion mix journalism and politics.