John Marini provides an insightful commentary on Christopher Demuth's optimistic suggestion that President Trump and the Republican Congress will be able to revive separation of powers and, by so doing, rescue us from an “autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction” that the administrative state has created. Marini is less optimistic and spells out some of the major obstacles to rejuvenating “the primary practical defender of constitutional government, the separation of powers.”
Marini's focus here, as in so much of his path-breaking published work, is on pointing out the pernicious consequences of the Progressives' transformation of the American regime from a decentralized, constitutionally-limited government into a modern, centralized administrative state. The administrative state has vastly augmented the powers of the presidency even as it has vitiated those of the Congress, so much so that Congress no longer plays the role assigned to it under the Constitution's scheme of separated powers.
Read Full Article »