Here’s why Trump’s authority to fire Comey ensures your liberty

On Tuesday, James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I. was fired by President Donald Trump. Like much that Trump does, it was met with cries of “constitutional crisis.” Which on their face are laughable.

But there is a broader question lurking below the surface of the debate, which goes to the fundamental problem with our current political state: Should the president, in his capacity as executive, be able to fire any executive branch employee? The answer to that question gets at the heart of our political morass.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Ronald Pestritto explains in a paper examining the birth of the administrative state, the founders believed that man was inherently self-interested, and that any proper government must check man’s self-interest. That is the basis for the American system of checks and balances.

As Pestritto further explains, it is why three distinct branches of government were called for in the Constitution. Each branch was set with limited roles. The executive was granted only the powers to administer government. That would include hiring and firing.

The founders set up checks on that power to administer, by giving Congress the power of the purse, and the judiciary the power to interpret laws. Each branch was co-equal. Each action of those branches was set to be ultimately checked by the people, at the ballot box.

The founders believed in the rule of law. Pestritto defines this as set rules — that all people understand and agree upon ahead of time. Not rulemaking which happens on a whim.

A reliance on the rule of law is necessary when one presupposes that all men are fallible and given to self-interest. Pestritto points his reader to Federalist No. 6, in which “Publius addresses the Anti-Federalist and Enlightenment notion that human nature had improved and become less dangerous. [Publius] characterizes those holding such notions as ‘far gone in utopian speculations.’”

Under the constitutional framework of government, the president is vested with ultimate administrative authority. That was the founders’ intent. Through that lens, what Trump did earlier this week is exactly what the framers of the Constitution expected the president to do. If that action was grossly unnecessary, they set up a system by which the legislative branch, through the power of the purse or impeachment could respond.

James Madison argued that certain maladministration could arise to the level of an impeachable offense, according to Justia.com.

Which brings us to the current state of affairs, and back to Pestritto. In the late 1800s the first civil service law at the national level was enacted, but this did not immediately set us on the path to an unaccountable administrative state. As Pestritto painstakingly details the responsibility for that falls to Woodrow Wilson, even before he became president.

Wilson believed that the Constitution’s system of checks and balances — and the vesting of governmental administration to the executive was antiquated. He pushed for and established the modern administrative state. Wilson fought for separating the administrators of government from politics. Here’s how Pestritto explains it:

In short, Wilson, and his ilk, believed that government administrators were selfless and professional. He believed that a professional administrative class, which now numbers 1.4 million people, was preferable to a smaller, more limited government answerable to the people.

The founders believed that the legislative and judicial functions should not be carried out by administrators. But that is exactly what happens today. The Code of Federal Regulations are not promulgated by Congress, and signed into law by the president. No, unaccountable professional administrators, in effect, make law. Not only do they make law, through administrative courts and administrative law judges, the executive branch now takes on the role of the judicial branch in some cases.

This perversion of the system set up by the founders is at the root of many of our crises today. The progressive notion that unelected bureaucrats, including the F.B.I. director, are somehow independent of presidential authority, is in and of itself a form of tyranny.

When people argue that no one man, or woman, should have the power to fire anyone in the executive branch of government … ask yourself, what is worse: Giving one man, constrained by checks and balances, the ability to form and administrate government as he told the voters he would do, or a 1.4 million-strong, largely unaccountable bureaucracy chugging along, that is too big to be changed? Not only by one man, but even by that man in concert with the legislative and judicial branches?

Which of the above scenarios is more tyrannical, and infringes upon your liberty?

The answer is self-evident.

Editor's note: The image for this piece has been updated to better reflect the article's content.