Workarounds
What to do when you know you're right about a course of action at the outset, but there is a process to go through and the process might throw up another outcome instead? I know that it depends. I know that some processes are more important than others and the likely consequences of not following protocol vary in their severity. Not following the correct processes at a nuclear facility is likely to have an outcome that is orders of magnitude worse than simply failing to apply the edicts of Human Resources when conducting a job interview; for example.
So, there are some categories of process that really shouldn't be messed with unless and until there is a clearly evidenced emergency that calls for a deviation from the norm. This must be the exception, though, and not the rule. Further, manufactured crises don't qualify. Equally, some processes are more akin to guidelines, considered to be the best way of doing a certain thing and it may be that, under some circumstances, other methods work better. Hence the expression “ rules are for the guidance of wise men and the (slavish) obedience of fools.” They are the framework that is generally deemed necessary if a specified end is to be achieved. However, this philosophy only applies when it is the end that is of primary importance, not the process.
Inevitably, as soon as we stray from a policy of full compliance with the process, we enter potentially contentious territory. We have to acknowledge that we are now exercising a subjective judgement and that this judgement has a legitimate role to play in the process as well. We have to accept that not every process is set in stone, but in so doing (and accepting judgement's usefulness) we must also realize that, even if our departure from full compliance is motivated by the desire to avoid the failure that was inevitably coming, abetted by blind obedience to the process, there is still no guarantee of success. We may still fail.
We must also pay heed to the fact that some people have better judgement than others and that there are those who will intervene and insert their own solution rather sooner than is necessary. Equally, there will be others who are either less confident in their judgement or less inclined to meddle who will leave well alone when it's clear that things are going sideways. There will also be those who will inevitably abuse the privilege and override the process when there is neither need nor justification, but rather a bad case of Messiah complex instead, manifesting itself in the conviction that they are right and, because the process was going to produce a 'wrong' outcome, they had to intervene to prevent it.
All of the above applies when the outcome is primary and the process is secondary. When the process itself is sacrosanct, rather than the result, there is a shift in emphasis. Now the justification for altering the process is non-existent unless it improves it. An election would belong in this second category, for instance. The process is of paramount importance; it cannot be interfered with simply to achieve a desired end. Conversely, a teaching method that isn't working could be tinkered with because the intention – imbuing the students with knowledge – is the primary consideration. The differences between these two categories are clear.
Or at least they are to most people. Zealots and sociopaths, on the other hand, have difficulty differentiating between them, due to the fact that they always know what the outcome should be, regardless. That certitude is, after all, one of the primary attributes of a zealot. Sociopaths are a different category, although they often evince the same conviction. They simply lack the ideological justification for their actions, acting wholly in their own self interest at all times.
Either way, the result is the same. These people will corrupt the process to achieve their desired result; in any and all cases, if necessary. For then, the process is something that needs to be worked around rather than heeded. This may be done openly, but usually isn't because there is normally some utility in maintaining an illusion of rectitude. When people lie to cover something up, they do because they know that they are in breach of what is expected. Logically then, when the neutering of the process is hidden and denied, there is clear conscious malfeasance. Additionally, the perpetrators must be of the opinion that they are not capable of changing the process legitimately or, at minimum, that they don't want to be seen to be doing so. And so they lie and cheat to attain their goals.
It's worth noting that, although their sin will be the greater in cases where the process itself is primary but bypassed– inasmuch as it is a complete subversion of what is most important – they are also engineering their own manufactured outcomes in cases where judgement might usefully be employed to achieve good results instead. They are intervening to tip the scales in their favor, not for the benefit of anyone else. The result may also benefit others, but that is merely a by product.
There is a reason why people like this believe they are right and it's the only conceivable reason. For instance, it can't be because they believe themselves inferior to others. It must be the polar opposite. They must believe that they are superior. If they believe themselves justified in trampling over the systems and processes that were deemed appropriate by others, it must be because they know better, by dint of their superior reasoning skills and knowledge, presumably. Yes, this conviction needs to be married to a desire to impose their will on others rather than simply bask in their own brilliance, but action necessarily follows conviction.
The practice of democracy, however it is precisely configured in different Western nations, is an example of a process that is supposed to be sacrosanct – like elections. It is not an outcome driven process. This is because it is a system that is rooted in the will of the demos; the people. However, a belief in their own superiority has infused our elites from both sides of the aisle – and the denizens of the administrative state – for decades. This is not speculation. It can clearly be demonstrated by their actions. I'll refer to these actions as workarounds. These are many ways of circumventing the democratic process and the elites are familiar with all of them. Most anti-democratic mechanisms are largely embedded already.
However, a few of the more extreme are yet to be carried through. The fact that these additional workarounds are even being considered is a powerful indicator of just how far the elites' desires have diverged from the rest of society's. If they are openly plotting to destroy some foundation stones of democracy (and they are) – because that is the only way that they can guarantee permanent dominance – then not only are their policy desires markedly different, so is their way of achieving them. This power grab is ongoing across nearly all Western democracies. I shall focus on the US, but those of you that live elsewhere will doubtless recognize the parallels.
It's worth noting that both sides of the aisle have been guilty of trying to short circuit democracy over the past couple of decades. However, the current administration is pursuing all possible avenues in a fashion not seen before, in a headlong pursuit of so-called 'radical change', otherwise known as an authoritarian takeover. If an existing process doesn't deliver the result they desire they will circumvent it, augment it, corrupt it or alter it, but one thing they won't do is respect it.
They have an agenda that they want to implement and they are using every available tool to do so, regardless of the proper use to which each tool should be put. The biggest impediment to be overcome is the reality that, although they have control of the Senate and the House (and, obviously, the Presidency), they lack a 60 seat majority in the Upper Chamber and 60 votes is what is required for the successful passage of legislation; whilst a simple majority passes the law, 60 senators are required to move to an actual vote. This administration would hardly be the first to encounter that particular problem, not that you'd know to listen to them, but this legislative caveat is a necessary safeguard which, in a two party system, ensures that the minority party also has a say.
Without a super-majority, inevitably, they are unable to pass radical bills that the Republicans oppose. They are obliged to dial down their approach so that they might garner at least some support from the opposition. This they are not inclined to do and so, naturally, the progressives that now dominate the Democratic Party seek to circumvent Senate rules and get their way anyway. In justifying this approach, they claim that the public elected them because of their agenda and they should, therefore, be allowed to pursue it in its entirety.
In the first place, the latter sentiment is not true. Even if we allow that Biden is the legitimate President (and the evidence supporting that theory is virtually non-existent), the Senate is locked 50-50 and the Democrat majority in the House is just 6 out of a total of 435. So, 50% of the Senate and 50.7% of the House is Democrat. Additionally, the official results of the Presidential election hung on around 80,000 votes in the swing states, out of a total in excess of 150 million. Given the evidence of rampant fraud favoring Biden, it is difficult to believe that the down ballot voting was, in contrast, the very definition of probity.
In reality, a true mandate for a radical agenda can justly be claimed when the public has provided a ringing endorsement in all three categories, not just the one. And that clearly isn't the case, particularly when two other factors are taken into account. Biden was far from candid about his future intentions during his election campaign and at least some of the Democrat support must have been anti-Trump, rather than pro-Biden. In truth, Biden barely campaigned at all and the detail of what policies he was proposing to 'deal with climate change', for instance, was largely lacking. Nonetheless, despite all of the above, the Left continue peddle the 'mandate' fiction, even though current polling indicates that nearly 70% of the electorate believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction.(1) As noted many times previously, they don't care whether they're being truthful.
The administration's lie is important, because it is the justification for much of the malfeasance that follows. The Left parades their frustration at what they mischaracterise as the reckless obstructionism of the Republicans who, unsurprisingly, block progressive bills that expand the welfare state, add trillions to the deficit and mandate policies that are already impoverishing tens of millions of Americans.
It's not important if the public believes that their faux outrage is genuine or not. It's just theater, a political version of painting by numbers. In the world that they inhabit, the elites have fashioned a particular way of doing things. The fact that the real world operates differently either doesn't occur to them or doesn't matter to them. In our world (until the penalty for straight-talking became prohibitively expensive for most), fakery and BS are called out and labelled accordingly. False claims, such as the ones the Democrats are chanting relentlessly, would be swiftly refuted, but because the Republicans are a captured opposition, the other wing of the uniparty, and because the mainstream media are their cheerleaders rather than their inquisitors, the Left is able to continue with the charade. As a result, the workarounds that they then employ are, to them, the next logical course of action and morally justifiable. In no particular order...
Executive Overreach
One of the more blatant examples of this behavior is the administration's use of Presidential Executive Orders (EOs). EOs, plus other instruments such as memoranda and proclamations, are solely intended to be instructions for the executive branch of government – effectively, the administrative state and federal agencies. They are the written version of the oral commands that any business leader might give to their staff and, if that's all they still were, there would be little controversy. Provided, of course, that the instructions are lawful and constitutional. And that these instructions are not capable of substantially affecting the wider public – an outcome that should be the result of legislative action, not executive. Somewhat inevitably, this hasn't always been the case and certainly isn't currently.
Clinton was notorious for his cavalier approach to EOs which amounted to an attempt to rule by executive fiat. Obama, despite declaring
“I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the Executive Branch to make it happen. I’m committed to making it happen, but I’ve got to have some partners to do it. …”(2)
then proceeded to ignore Congress when his plan to legalize the immigration status of illegal aliens who were allegedly minors when they first arrived (DACA) was thwarted, and imposed the policy via Executive Order.(3) On the face of it, this goes well beyond mere instructions to the executive branch; it's clearly a re-writing of legislation, affecting the aliens themselves and, by implication, citizens who achieved that status via legal means, but when Trump tried to undo it – also by EO – the Supreme Court declined to rule on the substance of the policy, hiding behind procedural issues instead, and left the policy in place.(4)
Clinton also used Executive Orders to abuse the Antiquities Act by designating vast tracts of federal land as monuments, thus restricting access to natural resources and preventing almost all future uses of the land. He rode roughshod over any mining, grazing or timber leases owned by private individuals in pursuit of his environmental policies, which Congress would not approve.(5)
However, Biden is taking legislating from the Oval Office to a whole new level. Frequently, as with Obama, what these orders contain are forms of words that are cut and pasted from bills that have failed to pass muster in Congress. Provisions of the Green New Deal have been introduced in this fashion and, as with the previous examples, EOs such as these constitute a gross abuse of process. It's a pattern that reoccurs repeatedly; failed legislation being foisted onto the people anyway, via a few strokes of the President's quill.
The US, in common with many other 'democracies', is constructed so as to have three co-equal branches of government; the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. This is the embodiment of the concept of the separation of powers. This structure is representative of the system of checks and balances intended to foil any attempt to embed governmental tyranny.
The legislators are the people's elected representatives, the executive branch (headed by the President) is charged with implementing the will of the people and the judiciary is a backstop, whose role it is to adjudicate by properly interpreting the law of the land. Executive Orders that subvert the role of the legislature, either by imposing policies that have already been rejected or by crafting completely new ones, turn three branches of government into two and eliminate the the people's voice – which is, of course, the intention.
In the first week of Biden's presidency, he signed more EOs than any other President before him – 21. For context, Trump signed 4, Obama 5, Clinton 1 and Bush Junior none.(6) This despite the fact that Biden's party controls both chambers of Congress. He has continued signing them ever since. The sheer number (ninety five), while substantial, is not the most reliable measure of potential abuse; it's the content of them that is the best indicator. This is due to the fact that, when the interests of the President and the interests of the administrative state are non-aligned, compliance with EOs can be less than wholehearted and drawing conclusions from the sheer volume of orders would be misleading.
However, when both entities are in harmony (which occurs more frequently when there is a Democratic presidency), Congress can be readily railroaded, because even a plainly unconstitutional presidential directive can be enthusiastically implemented by the federal agency in question, because they are on the same ideological page as the President. The only viable safeguard (which may intercede when the process is abused) is the judicial system, which is also Left leaning, and even if it were to so do, considerable time may elapse before the courts restore the status quo. If the Supreme Court is also dominated by progressives, the democratic system of government can be completely bypassed.
Something similar is happening right now. Biden's action on food stamps, Obamacare subsidies and the student loan pause cost money – lots of it; $250-$300 billion, $34 billion and $85 billion respectively.(7) Once again, a policy that couldn't pass in the Build Back Better bill (the Obamacare provision) is instituted via executive fiat. Once again, Presidential directives have been used in a way that directly effects the population, not just the Executive Branch – the student loan pause is being paid for out of the public purse, even though 210 million Americans don't have student debt, as opposed to 45 million who do. In the past few days, Biden has announced measures that cancel some of this debt in its entirety. Given that these measures have been implemented via EOs, none of these measures can be budgeted for, either. And Congress is responsible for holding the purse strings, not the President.
“President Biden has been a constitutional recidivist in executive overreach in a series of major court losses. The authority cited is highly challengeable. To assume such a massive power to excuse as much as $500 billion, that authority should be both express and clear. It is not.”(8)
Biden has also misused the Defense Production Act to fund domestic production of clean energy (such as solar panels and heat pumps), claiming that this is in some way necessary in enhancing national security.(9) This is one more item on the Build Back Better wish-list that didn't make it through Congress. He has also ordered that the cost of certain kinds of housing that are provided for the homeless are eligible to be reimbursed by the federal government, thus forcing federal taxpayers from across the country to subsidize failed Democrat run states like California and Oregon.(10)
In response to opposition in the Senate – from his own party, as well as the Republicans – Biden is now intimating that he will declare a climate emergency so that he may override the legislative branch:
“There’s no “It’s Summer” clause in the Constitution, empowering the president to ignore the will of Congress and unilaterally govern when it gets hot. The rejection of the president’s “agenda” by the lawmaking branch of government isn’t a justification for executive action, it’s the opposite. The Senate has unambiguously declined to implement Biden’s climate plan.”(11)
In similar vein, he has already issued an order that aims to force the American economy to be carbon free by 2050:
“The order consists of three consecutive goals, with the first being “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity on a net annual basis by 2030,” followed by “100 percent zero-emission vehicle acquisitions by 2035, including 100 percent zero-emission light-duty vehicle acquisitions by 2027,” which will allegedly culminate in “a carbon pollution-free electricity sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.”(12)
The fact that these orders are clearly illegal does not bother the progressives. Blatantly illegal EOs are issued shamelessly because they believe that they are right and they also believe that this entitles them to do whatever it takes to implement their agenda. One of the first such orders decreed that every federal agency place 'equity' at the heart of everything they do – not equality, equity. They are probably hoping that Americans don't understand the difference between the two. However,
"Equality is typically defined as treating everyone the same and giving everyone access to the same opportunities. Meanwhile, equity refers to proportional representation (by race, class, gender, etc.) in those same opportunities."(13)
Thus, racial groups are to be treated differently – unequally – which is a direct violation of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment and it is inconceivable that the administration is unaware of that fact. But that didn't stop them, nor will it in the future. However, ignoring the law is one thing, egregious though it is; at least there is the possibility of legal redress. But ignoring the law and a recent judgement by SCOTUS is another thing entirely, but that's what Biden has also done when he signed an order extending the eviction moratorium during the 'pandemic. Congress had already declined to extend and Justice Kavanagh had ruled that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) had exceeded its statutory authority in mandating the first moratorium.(14) The legal position couldn't have been clearer.
Not only that; he even admitted that he was circumventing the courts, the law and his oath of office. I suspect that the reason he was content to cop to what is an impeachable offence was because he thought he was right and everybody else was wrong, in which case he was entitled to ignore the process and skip straight to the result. As previously noted, that's the way the progressives think – democracy is an inconvenience that needs to be worked around.
Majority Rule
Executive overreach is an effective tool when the CEO and the staff are of similar mind. Even illegal and unconstitutional orders can be implemented without hindrance. Plus, if a compliant media has no interest in publicizing Biden's actions then, in truth, there is very little downside for the Executive Branch. Yes, an EO might eventually be overturned by the courts because it's illegal (which happened recently with orders mandating vaccines and testing in private companies and another that had imposed a moratorium on federal gas and oil lease sales),(15)(16) but nobody is held to account. There is no deterrent and so, inevitably, bad actors flourish.
The 60 vote requirement can be overcome in another way, too. It's called Budget Reconciliation and it is such an obvious workaround that it's surprising that it hasn't been used more in previous years. The setting of a federal budget is supposed to work like this. In general terms, the two houses of Congress come up with their own resolutions; these are then melded into one and a vote is taken. The Budget Resolution (a resolution, not a law), if passed by a simple majority, is then parsed to 12 separate committees to add the meat to the bone. Each prepares a bill, which is then subject to a vote in both houses. At this point, 60 votes is needed for the bills to pass. In this way a degree of bi-partisanship is guaranteed.
Budget reconciliation, an alternative process, is the current vogue and it's being used in ways for which it was never designed:
“In short, budget reconciliation is essentially a process which begins with Congress passing a budget plan (or resolution), instructing committees to write legislation that conforms to the budget plan, and consolidating each committee’s legislation into a reconciliation bill. That is, reconciliation bills were intended to “reconcile” Congress’s budget plan with its actual spending and revenue.”(17)
There are rules preventing the passing of legislation via reconciliation. In particular, there's the Byrd Rule – which is law – which prohibits the majority party from using reconciliation to pass policies unrelated to the budget, policies that would normally be subject to the 60 vote rule (the filibuster).(18) If the Byrd Rule is ignored, however, the only limit to the legislation that can be passed with a simple majority would exist in the consciences of individual Democratic senators.
Naturally, because the progressives are right and everyone else is wrong (remember?), they are abusing the democratic process to achieve their desired result and pursuing their agenda undemocratically. Progressives recognize no process that is sacrosanct. For them, the ends always justifies the means. And so we have yet more provisions of the Build Back Better 'climate change' bill rammed through in reconciliation in the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act. This should have been the subject of a 60 vote super-majority but it wasn't. This is not the first such bill; the regime did the same thing last year, with many provisions that are designed to worsen the lot of ordinary Americans:
“For example, the “Clean Energy Performance Program” seeks to financially penalize utilities that do not meet arbitrary increases in renewable electric generation and subsidize those that reach a certain percentage. It’s a de facto mandate that will interfere with the free market and ignores decades of evidence that renewable energy simply isn’t reliable.
Additionally, the Civilian Climate Corps proposes to employ 1.5 million people, “regardless of immigration status” ... to promote the progressive climate agenda. This provision would allow unelected bureaucrats to funnel taxpayer money to activist organizations with nearly no oversight, saddling the country with massive costs.
All these policies have two things in common: they will have no effect whatsoever on climate change, but they will make the energy we need more expensive and less reliable.”(19)
The tactics employed constitute an end run around the filibuster, the 60 vote requirement in order to pass laws. By these means, a substantial proportion of their green agenda is being implemented. But there are still some limits to what is allowed, even if the regime tramples over protocol and the law. At least, there's one in particular that they haven't yet ignored.
The Senate Parliamentarian is the person ruling on what may or may not go in a Reconciliation Bill. She has stripped out two elements of the progressive wish list so far – the $15 dollar minimum wage and an amnesty for illegal immigrants – and Democrat senators have also had their say, which has resulted in other policies being watered down or temporarily shelved. Nonetheless, the Far Left will keep coming. They won't stop and they certainly won't be balked by any established process. Additionally, there are other polices that the Democrats are intent on implementing, notably federal gun laws, federal voting laws, federal abortion laws and the remainder of the Green New Deal which, incidentally, will cost each American family $165,000 each.(20)
And so, avoiding the need for a 60 vote majority by sabotaging the budget process isn't enough for them. The filibuster for any legislation is now under threat. The majority party argues that, due to the obstruction of the minority party, it is the continued existence of the filibuster that has forced them to use the budget reconciliation process. In truth though, the Republicans aren't the minority party in the Senate, as it's all square at 50-50 and the Democrats are reliant upon the Vice President voting with them and breaking the tie. However, the notion that an administration can't govern with the filibuster in place is not one that is supported by history.
“It is true that the filibuster stops a party that is intent on governing unilaterally and steamrolling half the country using a razor-slim, fleeting majority. Or, at least, it once did. Which only means the filibuster was working. And if the ideological chasm between the parties is too wide to forge compromise, then it's not the time for Washington to be passing wide-ranging generational legislation anyway. Nothing in the Constitution says a party must pass big, transformational bills. It's a choice.”(21)
But it's a choice that zealots and ideologues will inevitably make when there is a window of opportunity. The past eighteen months has provided that via the abuse of reconciliation. They've also had a go at removing this last remaining restraint. The filibuster is hanging by a thread and can be voted out of existence (or temporarily suspended, in theory) by a simple majority vote via a parliamentary procedure known as the nuclear option.(22) The regime has already tried (in January) and was defeated 52-48.(23) At the moment, only the usual two Democrat senators are against (Manchin and Sinema), but they were both bullied into the Green New Deal lite after a prolonged stand-off, so whether they will continue to hold or can be bought off again is anybody's guess.(24)
It can be seen that the junta have been ruthless in implementing their agenda, through fairs means or foul. Often, they have attempted to pass legislation in the first place and then used the failure of it as justification for their subsequent actions. However, Executive Orders and Budget reconciliation are merely two of the tools that the political elites and the administrative state use in order that they may exercise their will at the expense of the democratic process.
Agency Overreach
Where does the law stop and 'guidance' and regulation begin? Not in theory, in practice? I don't believe that many of us know and our inability to draw a distinction means that administrative overreach is a possibility and, in reality, a probability, both in teams of introducing rules that have the force of law and in attempting to re-write existing legislation from behind a desk. A prime example of this tendency is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), who appear to have decided to limit their remit to firearms alone.
There is no federal register of firearms in the USA. There is no power to search for firearms absent a warrant. There is duly enacted law (particularly the National Firearms Act of 1934, which was later amended by the Gun Control Act of 1968) which, while almost certainly unconstitutional - in large part due to its overt infringement of Second Amendment rights - does define what a firearm is, among many other things.(25) None of this has prevented the ATF from levying taxes on the exercise of a constitutional right, arbitrarily delaying the issuance of firearms permits for months,(26) attempting to change the legal definition of a firearm,(27) photographing entire gun dealer registries (in direct contravention of the relevant law),(28) and arriving unannounced at residences to check private individuals' inventories without a warrant.(29)
They aren't the only agency that abuses its remit. The Energy Protection Authority believed it had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and so adopted the Affordable Clean Energy rule in 2019 which gave them virtually unlimited regulatory powers under the Clean Air Act. They didn't have the authority – they just assumed it.(30) In similar vein, the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York have wholeheartedly gone along with an EO that forces a whole raft of 'climate change' rules on the companies quoted on its exchange.(31) These rules are capricious, extremely expensive, largely unenforceable and pointless.
“Independent federal agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), wield tremendous federal power, exercising executive functions (e.g., conducting investigations), legislative functions (e.g., enacting regulations and issuing guidance), and judicial functions (e.g., adjudicating penalties for noncompliance) all under one jurisdictional roof. James Madison called this arrangement “the very definition of tyranny” in The Federalist Papers No.47.”(32)
Which is precisely what it is. That's why the three co-equal branches of government were created in the first place; it was decided that the people were citizens, not subjects. In contravention of this tenet, the SEC gets to play God and the enormous costs of the implementation and subsequent administration of these rules (collectively known as ESG or environmental, social and governance) is borne by the public; that's what always happens in these circumstances, as business offsets expenses by charging higher prices. And the whole edifice is constructed with absolutely no public input.
The CDC – and, internationally, the WHO - are yet further examples of overreach, this time powered by the collusion of Big Business. Incrementally, this relationship has evolved into a cosy partnership whereby the federal agency provides the cover for the authoritarians in the private sector.
Government/Big Business nexus
Throughout the 'pandemic', business cited the CDC or the WHO as arbiters of public health policy. 'Guidance' became mandatory because businesses made it so. Warnings started appearing underneath YouTube videos and on social media – that is, before the likes of Twitter became bolder and simply banned people who deviated from the official narrative. Airlines insisted on mask mandates, citing CDC 'guidance'. The federal government wasn't shy in publicizing the fact they were colluding with Big Tech, with the President's Press Secretary confirming that they were in regular touch with social media companies and that the Surgeon General's office was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread.”(33) She also wanted “every platform to continue doing more to call out mis- and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information.”(34)
Vivak Murthy, the Surgeon General himself, spent a good proportion of last summer calling for Big Tech to censor anyone he deemed to be guilty of spreading information.(35) For his part, Zuckerberg (the co-founder of Facebook/Meta) confirmed that Facebook used an algorithm to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story – not on their own initiative, but at the request of the FBI.(36) He made that admission in answer to a direct question. However, I strongly suspect that this instance of federally instigated censorship is merely the tip of the iceberg. It's common knowledge that Twitter has deleted tweets at the direction of government employees (37) and banned scores of conservative journalists.(38) Whether that was all their own idea is unknown, but it seems hugely unlikely.
The federal government now has a lengthy track record of using private businesses to do what it is constitutionally unable to do itself. By these means, mask and vaccine mandates, together with Big Tech censorship of the First Amendment (the right to free speech) can all be implemented without the regime getting its hands dirty, even though circumventing and undermining the rights of citizens is, once gain, a corruption of the democratic process. But they don't care, because they are right and the ends justifies the means. There are two other workarounds that are currently being deployed. Both are damaging, one more than the other.
Other means employed
The US conducts a census every ten years, the last of which was in 2020. This proved to be highly contentious and, due to a sudden eruption of lawfare, illuminating too. It's worth noting that the Census is important for mostly political reasons, as it on the basis of the population counts that the apportionment of Congressional seats is based. As is often the case, once a spotlight is shone on a particular issue, there are unexpected revelations and the Census is no different; it transpires that undocumented migrants are being counted and always have been.(39)
This discovery is unexpected because, if one were to exercise a degree of common sense, one might note that those Americans elected to Congress are there as representatives of the people, as defined as citizens, and that illegal aliens are not citizens. Therefore, counting them in the census will inevitably skew the system of political representation by effectively condoning a federal crime, which is what illegal immigration is. Trump tried cut through the Gordian knot, but was shot down by SCOTUS. So, as the southern border is currently invisible (and has been since Biden ascended to the throne), the 4.9 million illegal and largely undocumented immigrants that have entered the US in the past eighteen months, plus the millions more that are yet to arrive, will all be counted in the next Census – in additional to those that were already resident prior to that.(40) That number was somewhere between 20 million and 38 million fifteen years ago.(41) It would be wise to assume that the new arrivals, when they have been bussed and flown around the country by the regime, it has happened strategically. The Democrats are counting on their votes, so it's difficult to see it happening any other way.(42)
The Census is also being manipulated in the here and now. To nobody's surprise, the errors in the 2020 edition benefited one side of the aisle and harmed the chances of the other. Of the eight states in which it over-counted populations, seven were blue states. In the six states that were under-counted, all but one was Republican. The net result of this partisanship is that billions of dollars in federal funds will be misallocated to Democrat states. Further,
“Those costly errors will distort congressional representation and the Electoral College. It means that when the Census Bureau reapportioned the House of Representatives, Florida was cheated out of two additional seats it should have gotten; Texas missed out on another seat; Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept a representative they shouldn’t have; and Colorado was awarded a new member of the House it didn’t deserve.”(43)
In the 2010 Census, the reported error rate was 0.01%, or 36,000 people. This time around, Florida alone was under-counted by 750,000. Texas was also down 560,319 on the true number of residents.(44) Unsurprisingly (because the scam wouldn't have been attempted otherwise), there is no remedy available to correct the fraud. The net result is, of course, another abrogation of democracy, inasmuch as some now have more influence than they deserve (the Democrat states) and others now have less (the Republican states). The plan, presumably, is to keep racking up the illegitimate marginal gains that will enable the administration to maintain its hold on power.
The second workaround is far more damaging and has been for decades. It concerns the UN's Agenda 21/2030 and the Paris Climate Accords. The former was signed in June 1992, the latter in 2015. All the 'climate change' nonsense, including regulations that govern our lives in ways we are completely unaware of - but which range from regulating where we can live to what we can eat – springs from one of these two abominations. The green energy policies that have resulted in the cost of living crisis - and which are also responsible for the hugely problematic winter that lies in wait - are all derived from these agreements. As are electric cars, fake meat and cricket sandwiches, plans for digital currencies and ID's.
Agenda 21/2030 lists a number of activities that don't meet the UN's self defined metric of sustainability and are, therefore, targeted for elimination. These include:
All private property ownership and rights.
All forms of crop irrigation, pesticides and commercial fertilizers, except when approved for Big Business.
Livestock production and most meat consumption.
Private owned vehicles and personal travel.
The burning of fossil fuels.
Single family homes and suburban communities.
Most forms of mining and timber harvesting.(45)
This list is non exhaustive. Nonetheless, were these actions to be implemented, they would fundamentally degrade the American lifestyle and that of all other Western democracies. And the workaround that has been adopted? Believe it or not, neither agreement is binding. They aren't law. They aren't even treaties either, because a treaty would need to be ratified by a super-majority in Congress; this time, 67 senators. Bush Senior, who signed up to 21/2030 in the first place, didn't have the votes. Plus, bringing an appropriate bill before Congress would raise an enormous red flag, because the detail of the agreement would become public knowledge. And so,
...within months, Cabinet level agencies and U.N. Sponsored Non-Governmental Organizations started embedding policies of sustainable development into bureaucratic regulations.... Shortly after his inauguration in 1993, President Bill Clinton created The President’s Council on Sustainable Development by executive order. By making “sustainable development” a permanent feature of all Federal policy within the Administrative Branch, he effectively bypassed Congress and threw the Agenda 21 implementation process into high gear...Although Agenda 21 was never ratified by the Senate as required by law, 95% of all Federal regulations are tied to UN Agenda 21/2030 sustainability policies that target American sovereignty.”(46)
The full scale of the climate agreements has never been officially revealed to the public. Both parties (in the US and the vast majority of parties elsewhere) have made 'sustainability' a policy aim. The people have never had the opportunity to vote on any aspect of the climate scam. In all probability, the interweaving of climate policies into every aspect of lives – without our knowledge or permission – has been the most egregious workaround of all.
Court Packing
Lastly although, given the necessary constraints of the essay format, almost certainly not exclusively, there is the specter of court packing – as in, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). President Trump had the good fortune to nominate (and have appointed) three 'conservative' Justices. The remainder of the court is split evenly, with the liberals (in reality, fairly Far Left) having three. The court is, therefore, split 6-3 on ideological grounds, which is to say that six Justices are generally committed to upholding the Constitution (which is in the job description) and three are exclusively interested in interpreting said Constitution as a 'living document' and undermining it at every possibility. It should be added that at least two of the supposedly conservative judges have their woke moments also and vote with the liberals.
Nonetheless, the conservative faction win out more often than not, which is as it should be. By definition, a conservative would be more likely to conserve and a progressive would be more likely to change and changing the Constitution is not supposed to be the task at hand. Predictably, the Left is not happy with this state of affairs. They would, of course, be happy if the make-up of the Court favored them, but it doesn't. And so, as with every other matter I have detailed, they are trying to find ways to workaround the problem. This is, once again, because they have no respect for the process of democracy. They just care about winning and they will slash and burn any constitutional impediment in order to do so.(47)
Irking them yet further is the fact that appointments to SCOTUS are for life, although retirement is permitted. None of the conservative Justices suffers from ill-health, nor are they too advanced in years. In short, the Democrats are facing the probability that the conservative majority will last for a decade or more. This is a stone in their political shoe and so they are taking steps to extract it. Biden appointed a Commission on the Court early in his tenure and, unsurprisingly (as that is precisely what Presidential Commission's are for) they released a report which was bland, unthreatening and yet purported to provide legitimate grounds to expand the Court, by adding four Justices. Conveniently, this would then tip the court the way of the progressives, 7 to 6.(48)
In the real world, there are no legitimate grounds. Never in US history has the Court been expanded with the intention of taking political control of it. FDR once proposed doing just that and it didn't go well:
“...Court-packing was infamously proposed by Franklin Roosevelt. Yet, after Roosevelt’s putsch floundered, a bipartisan consensus emerged that Court-packing would be clearly unconstitutional—a fact that the Commission takes pains to conceal.”(49)
This earlier Commission's reasoning was impeccable. Court Packing would violate the first three articles of the Constitution; these are the ones that create the three distinct branches of government. A packed Court would effectively reduce that number to two branches, as a Court that simply facilitated the regime's trashing of the Constitution would be, to all intents and purposes, an entity that was indistinguishable from the Executive Branch. There would then be a binary government, an entirely different system than the one ratified by the states. Further, while the Court has previously comprised of fewer members, it has never had more. Indeed, it has been nine Justices since 1837, when two further subordinate judicial circuits were added in legitimate fashion – each Justice heads a regional appeals court circuit and two more circuits had been created.(50)
However, the current Democrat Commission glosses over these facts and reaches the conclusion that was demanded of it. Four new Justices may legitimately be added, all to be appointed by a Democrat administration, thus giving the liberals a majority and cart blanche to carry on abusing the democratic process, safe in the knowledge that they now had top cover. And so the time honored methods are once again employed. As the court recently produced three big defeats for the Leftists, moral outrage was not in short supply, ranging from calls to abolish the Court because it was launching a coup,(51) to a demand that, as the Court was now somehow illegitimate, it should justifiable be packed.(52)
Apparently, the court is now Far Right and must be expanded. House Democrats then joined the co-ordinated attack by calling for legislation to add four seats to SCOTUS.(50) Of course, any such bill would need 60 votes to overcome the filibuster, because there is no conceivable way that even the most house trained RINOs (Republican In Name Only) would vote themselves into obsolescence. However, as previously noted, it only takes 51 votes to abolish the filibuster itself. If that happened, the Democrats would attempt to force a court packing bill through in short order. They wouldn't seek to preserve democracy. They would effectively alter the entire system of government for short term political gain, process be damned and gamble that it won't be used against them in the future – which isn't much of a gamble if they are allowed to continue stealing elections.
And finally
It takes a particular type of person to do as the Left does. Whilst it's almost certainly true that most people will do what they deem necessary in extremis, regardless of the rules, they don't conduct themselves in that fashion at other times. The political elites, on the other hand, are cut from a different cloth and the progressive element is the least respectful of the wishes of others and of the democratic process that exists to turn those wishes into action.
Our 'democracies' have already been comprehensively undermined over decades of insidiously incremental regime overreach. We, the people, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. There are some remaining bulwarks against governmental tyranny, but these will also be dismantled if the progressives get their way. Spread the word.
Citations
(8) Jonathan Turley https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/25/bidens-student-loan-cancellation-is-illegal-critics-say/
(11) https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/19/biden-has-no-right-to-declare-a-national-climate-emergency/
(13) https://www.newsmax.com/reagan/affirmative-action-sytemic/2021/02/05/id/1008831/
(14) https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/06/bidens-unprecedented-attack-on-the-constitution/
(15) https://www.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-biden-vaccine-testing-mandate-covid-19-2022-1?op=1
(18) https://heritageaction.com/blog/reconciliation-and-the-byrd-rule
(20) Ditto
(22) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option
(23) https://nypost.com/2022/01/19/voting-bill-blocked-by-gop-filibuster/
(24) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10779485/Manchin-Sinema-say-WONT-killing-filibuster.html
(26) Ditto
(29)
(30) https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/scotus-restricts-upholds-epas-ability-to-regulate-power-plants/
(31) https://www.natlawreview.com/article/biden-administration-esg-activity-accelerates
(32) https://nclalegal.org/2020/05/its-not-better-to-beg-the-secs-unforgivable-use-of-unlawful-guidance/
(33) https://nypost.com/2021/09/06/federal-government-using-social-media-giants-to-censor-americans/
(34) https://nypost.com/2022/02/01/psaki-cheers-spotify-warning-on-joe-rogans-covid-podcasts/
(38) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
(41) https://capsweb.org/press-releases/illegal-aliens-estimated-20-38-million/
(42) https://nypost.com/2022/01/27/biden-is-hiding-illegal-immigration-with-secret-flights/
(43) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/census-bureau-admits-overcounting-7-blue-states-just-1-red-state
(44) Ditto
(45) http://rangefire.us/2022/01/11/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-dangers-of-agenda-21-30/
(46) Ditto
(47) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532391240162897920.html
(48) https://americanmind.org/memo/the-court-packing-coup/
(49) Ditto
(50) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/aoc-accuses-supreme-court-coup-and-calls-it-be-done-away
(52) https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/house-democrats-push-bill-add-four-seats-supreme-court