China is at war with us. Start acting like it.



Communist China isn’t hiding its ambitions. Beijing wants to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. It flies spy balloons over our country, runs influence operations, steals technology, pressures neighbors, menaces Taiwan, and builds missiles and ships meant to drive America out of the Western Pacific.

The Pentagon’s newly released National Defense Strategy puts the People’s Republic of China at the center of the threat picture. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth frames the task in blunt terms: “peace through strength,” including a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific so that China can’t “dominate us or our allies.”

China won’t ‘take over the world’ in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.

That doesn’t mean the United States and China are “destined for war.” China’s weaknesses cut against that. It lacks the kind of soft power that makes alliances easy and coercion unnecessary. Outside its borders, China inspires far more fear than admiration. Demographic collapse also looms. The one-child policy left China facing an aging population and a shrinking workforce.

None of that makes Beijing harmless. A declining regime can still lash out. It can still intimidate neighbors, manipulate markets, and exploit American openness. It can also run influence operations in plain sight — through front companies, academic partnerships, lobbying, investment vehicles, and the slow capture of key choke points in tech and infrastructure.

That calls for something Washington too often refuses to do: enforce rules like a serious country.

Start with basic counterintelligence hygiene. Aggressively investigate covert foreign influence. Enforce FARA. Protect sensitive research. Tighten screening around critical supply chains. Treat strategic industries like strategic industries. Strip Chinese “paper Americans” of their citizenship and deport them.

This is where internal discipline matters as much as external posture. A national strategy collapses when parts of the bureaucracy slow-walk it, freelance against it, or treat it like optional guidance.

Consider the recent ouster of Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater. She was in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division until last month. But she butted heads repeatedly with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Their disagreements slid into insubordination. Slater allegedly lied to Bondi on national security matters that appeared to help China.

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For example, Slater opposed the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquisition of Juniper Networks, which national security experts say is essential to combat Chinese tech dominance. Blocking the deal would have hurt U.S. industry and helped Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Happily, the administration overruled her and approved the deal.

Washington can’t run a serious China policy with internal sabotage, bureaucratic drift, or officials acting like they answer to a different set of priorities.

The same standard applies to national security decisions in the tech arena. If competition with Huawei and China’s tech ecosystem matters — and it does — then Washington should evaluate mergers, procurement, and infrastructure policy through that lens, not just through abstract theories divorced from geopolitical reality. America needs to win the next generation of networks, not regulate itself into strategic dependence.

China won’t “take over the world” in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.

Peace through strength isn’t a slogan. It’s a posture: defend critical systems, enforce the law, remove vulnerabilities, and stop treating strategic competition like a seminar topic. The first step is simple and unglamorous: clean up our own house, then face Beijing with the seriousness the moment demands.

How the laptop revolution destroyed public education



A recent Fortune magazine article made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.

Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

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The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

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Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself. Even Florida, which resisted lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online. Learning fell off a cliff. The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage did not end when students returned in person. After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students, parents, and administrators away from screen-based schooling. Digital integration became mandatory. No exceptions.

Now the corporate press arrives to play cleanup. Reporters discover the failure well after the money has been spent, the infrastructure has hardened, and a generation has been trained to treat a browser as a brain.

A way back

Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what helps students. The bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia even as evidence piles up. Parents and lawmakers need to force a reset: paper-based instruction as the default, screens as a tightly limited accommodation, and tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking. Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to Big Tech, stop laundering ideology through “digital citizenship,” and start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Start with elementary grades. Bring back books. Bring back handwriting. Bring back sustained attention. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

Kids learn slower, but they learn for real.

Where in the Constitution is ‘the interagency’ anyway?



Americans have some sense of how close the world came to a large-scale nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But today’s lapdog press has failed to tell the public how close the deep state dragged us to the jagged edge of conflagration through its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Only after Joe Biden — and the autopen — left the White House last year did the New York Times tell some of the story. That account, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” drawn from hundreds of interviews with military and intelligence officials, revealed what the deep state tried to conceal: just how perilous the global American military empire’s proxy war with Russia became.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness.

The escalation of the empire’s provocations and Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine turned into a deadly pas de deux. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times reported. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”

Now the Times has provided another look — fresh evidence long withheld — of the deep state’s efforts to subvert the Nixon White House. The essay, “Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now,” by reporter James Rosen, details a 13-month Pentagon spying operation against Nixon’s National Security Council.

Bristling at “policies they abhorred” — including détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnamization, Nixon’s China opening, and a reduced military share of federal spending — the deep state went straight to work.

Under orders from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer and others, a Navy enlisted man spied on the National Security Council, rifling through Henry Kissinger’s and Alexander Haig’s briefcases and desks, copying and stealing classified documents. “Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into NSC wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized.”

In all, an estimated 5,000 documents were delivered to the top brass.

Nixon learned of the Joint Chiefs’ espionage. The newly revealed material is evidence that, as Rosen writes, “Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum.”

Many informed people know that the deep state panicked when John F. Kennedy tapped the brakes on the Cold War. Among some, it remains an article of faith that his peace initiatives led to his assassination. In the Nixon case, Rosen writes, the lead federal investigator said what he was uncovering felt like “Seven Days in May,” the novel and film about a coup to stop a president pursuing détente.

It’s a mistake to think the deep state belongs only to history — to figures like Allen Dulles, the CIA chief who helped lead the subversion of Kennedy, or the Pentagon brass in this new Nixon account, or, even more recently, to John Brennan at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom lied to Congress about deep-state activities.

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Without number are the lesser officials and petty bureaucrats who serve the deep state. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer in Trump’s first term, is one such. Instrumental in the effort to impeach Trump, Vindman testified before Congress that he was alarmed that the president was “promoting a false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

The “views of the interagency”? What is an interagency? By what constitutional means and process of deliberation does it arrive at its consensus? Who are its members? Whom do they represent, and how are they selected? Is there a vote — secret or otherwise? By whom? Does it require a plurality or a majority? Who profits from its decisions? Where can citizens find the rules by which it must abide?

By any other name, Vindman was talking about the deep state — which I detail in my new book, “Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole” — as the executive arm of the global American military empire. Operating without rules, it is, as Arthur Schlesinger described the CIA to Kennedy, “a state within a state.” Its only consensus is the growth of the empire.

Like the mythical Augean stable, the deep state is a foul mess of illegality, waste, and corruption that has lingered for decades. Tasked with cleaning it as one of his 12 labors, Hercules knew better than to try to clean it bit by bit, shovelful by shovelful. Instead, he diverted rivers to wash away the overwhelming mess in a day.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness. The renewal of our free and prosperous republic awaits a diversion from our imperial trajectory. It awaits America coming home — and ending its global military empire of lies.

Idaho is deep red. So why do leftist bureaucrats still run the show?



Idaho votes like a conservative juggernaut. Republicans hold the governor’s mansion, both legislative chambers, and every statewide office. Yet the administrative state still runs on autopilot, and progressives who never win at the ballot box keep their hands on levers of power.

Last week delivered a clean example. Estella Zamora, the 72-year-old vice president of the Idaho Human Rights Commission, lost her seat after Gov. Brad Little withdrew her reappointment. Progressive activists erupted. The press corps dutifully framed it as a purge. But the real scandal sits one step earlier: Little’s office initially recommended her for another term, as if nobody bothered to look.

President Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ mandate doesn’t end at Maryland and Virginia’s borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate.

That rubber-stamp culture explains how red-state voters keep getting blue-state governance.

Zamora held influence for more than three decades. She didn’t win it from voters. She inherited it from the system. A Democratic governor appointed her in the 1990s. Republican administrations kept renewing her anyway, term after term, until she became another “untouchable” fixture inside Idaho’s bureaucracy.

Only public pressure forced movement. Conservative activists and outlets like the Gem State Chronicle, along with our own program, Idaho Signal, highlighted Zamora’s political activism online. She appeared before the Senate State Affairs Committee on Jan. 28 as part of the reappointment process. Lawmakers asked questions. The public noticed. Little reversed course a few days later.

Little made the right call in the end. The process that led to the near-miss should worry every Idaho voter.

Zamora didn’t simply hold personal opinions. She couldn’t resist using her public platform to attack Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency charged with enforcing federal immigration law. Her posts pushed anti-ICE propaganda, circulated protest material, and condemned enforcement operations as “harmful.” She aligned herself with the activist line that treats border enforcement as a moral offense.

Idaho doesn’t need every commissioner to share the governor’s politics. Idaho does need commissioners who can credibly carry out their duties without turning a state post into a political megaphone. A human rights commission depends on public confidence. Activism that signals contempt for lawful enforcement undermines that confidence.

This isn’t a free-speech dispute. Zamora can say whatever she wants as a private citizen. Voters can judge it. Officials must still decide whether that behavior fits a role that demands impartiality and restraint.

Progressives are already shouting “censorship” and “partisan purge.” They’re portraying Zamora as some saintly Latina icon victimized for speaking out. That rhetoric flips the facts. Nobody owes a lifetime appointment to someone who campaigns against the policies Idaho voters repeatedly choose in overwhelming numbers at the ballot box. Public service carries conditions. When the public loses trust, leaders should act.

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The greater lesson extends beyond Zamora.

Idaho’s bureaucracy keeps reappointing the same figures because too many Republican offices treat commissions and boards as background noise. Staffers recycle names. Vetting becomes procedural. Appointments become habit. Progressives understand this weakness, so they play the long game: They entrench themselves in institutions that outlast elections.

That pattern repeats across the country. Red states elect Republican leaders. Agencies keep advancing progressive priorities through regulation, enforcement discretion, and institutional culture. The left loses elections and wins governance anyway.

Republican governors and legislators can’t keep solving this problem only after activists force their hand. They should audit commissions and boards, review reappointments with real scrutiny, and replace partisan operatives with people who respect the mission and the law without bias and without apology.

President Trump’s “drain the swamp” mandate doesn’t end at the Maryland and Virginia borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate and treat public posts as ideological turf.

Idaho voters spoke loudly. The administrative state had better listen because we’re just getting started.

If parental rights can be bypassed in Alabama, no state is safe



Millions of Americans fled deep-blue states like California and New York because they believed the rules were different elsewhere. They moved to places like Alabama to escape lockdowns, mandates, and ideological capture of public institutions. They believed red states meant red lines.

That belief is proving dangerously naïve.

If red states cannot enforce their own parental rights laws, then the red-state refuge is a myth.

Alabama is one of the most conservative states in the country. It has a Republican supermajority and some of the strongest parental rights laws on the books: bans on gender-transition procedures for minors, curriculum transparency requirements, legal definitions of male and female, protections for girls’ sports, and a rare requirement that parents must opt in before schools provide any mental health services, including discussions of suicide or bullying.

And yet those protections are now being quietly hollowed out — not by legislators, but by bureaucratic subversion.

The footnote loophole

The Alabama State Department of Education is undermining parental consent by inserting exceptions into the fine print of a required opt-in form distributed after a new parental consent law took effect Oct. 1.

The law itself is unambiguous. Parents must provide prior written consent before schools offer mental health services, including discussions related to suicide or bullying. But the department claims in the footnotes that mental health-related conversations may still occur “as appropriate” in other school settings — and that these interactions do not require parental permission.

The ALSDE has stated that “instruction, advisement, and occasional interventions are not subject to opt-in requirements, as these are regular duties of school counselors and other educators.”

That language does more than stretch the statute. It appears designed to bypass it entirely. When schools engage minors in discussions with clear psychological or therapeutic implications — trauma, gender identity, suicidal ideation — without parental consent, they move into legally and constitutionally questionable territory.

Same playbook, new label

Parents have seen this before. During COVID, mandates were imposed first and justified later. Dissent was sidelined. Authority flowed downward, not outward.

Now the same model is being applied to school-based mental health. Whether embedded in social-emotional learning, “student wellness,” or character education, the result is the same: psychological interventions delivered by school employees, not licensed physicians, without parental oversight.

This is not a gray area. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed parents’ fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children. When school systems create end runs around opt-in requirements — especially on matters involving suicide or gender ideology — they invite serious legal and civil rights challenges.

No state is immune

This is not an Alabama anomaly.

Illinois now mandates mental health screenings for public school students, with no opt-in. Mississippi is rolling out a statewide “youth wellness platform.” Tennessee is placing mental health clinicians in every public school through a $250 million trust fund. Ohio is expanding school-based health centers that embed mental health treatment directly on campus.

These programs erase the line between education and health care. They normalize a system in which children’s emotions are monitored, recorded, and interpreted by the state without parental consent. That is state-sponsored emotional profiling.

Who decides what helps?

This debate is not about whether children need support. It is about who decides what support looks like — and who has the authority to provide it.

Parents possess a fundamental right to make decisions about their children’s mental and physical health. The Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor reaffirmed that when schools impose ideologically loaded services or content without notice or opt-out, they burden parental rights and religious liberty.

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Alabama’s counseling framework includes DEI-driven language encouraging students to “identify individual differences” and “describe and respect differences among individuals.” In practice, that language provides a vehicle for embedding gender ideology and values-based content into guidance lessons.

When that content is paired with school-based interventions, the issue is no longer education. It is ideological formation funded by taxpayers and imposed without consent.

Alabama’s warning

If this can happen in Alabama — arguably the most pro-parental-rights state in the country — then no state is safe.

Agencies should not be allowed to bury statutes in footnotes, reinterpret laws by memo, or use therapeutic language to bypass parental authority. These are not technical disagreements. They are unconstitutional and demand legal pushback.

If red states cannot enforce their own parental rights laws, then the red-state refuge is a myth.

Strong laws matter, but enforcement matters more. Parents must demand both.

Trump v. Slaughter exposes who really fears democracy



In the recently argued Trump v. Slaughter case, most of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to affirm what should be obvious: The president has a constitutional right under Article II to dismiss federal employees in the executive branch when it suits him.

That conclusion strikes many of us as self-evident. Executive-branch employees work under the president, who alone among them is chosen in a nationwide election. Bureaucrats are not. Why, then, should the chief executive’s subordinates be insulated from his control?

When the Roberts Court overturned Roe in 2022 and returned the issue to the states, many voters responded with fury. The electorate did not welcome responsibility. It resented it.

A vocal minority on the court appears to reject that premise. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor warned that allowing a president — implicitly a Republican one — to control executive personnel would unleash political chaos. Jackson suggested Trump “would be free to fire all the scientists, the doctors, the economists, and PhDs” working for the federal government. Sotomayor went further, claiming the administration was “asking to destroy the structure of government.”

David Harsanyi, in a perceptive commentary, identified what animates this view: “fourth-branch blues.” The administrative state now exercises power that rivals or exceeds that of the constitutional branches. As Harsanyi noted, nothing in the founders’ design envisioned “a sprawling autonomous administrative state empowered to create its own rules, investigate citizens, adjudicate guilt, impose fines, and destroy lives.”

Yet defenders of this system frame presidential oversight as a threat to “democracy.” Democrats, who present themselves as democracy’s guardians, warn that allowing agency officials to answer to the elected president places the nation in peril. The argument recalls their reaction to the Dobbs case, when the court returned abortion policy to voters and was accused of “undermining democracy” by doing so.

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Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

On that point, Harsanyi and I agree. Judicial and bureaucratic overreach distort constitutional government. The harder question is whether voters object.

From what I can tell, most do not. Many Americans seem content to trade constitutional self-government for managerial rule, provided the system delivers benefits and protects their expressive preferences. The populist right may bristle at this arrangement, but a leftist administrative state that claims to speak for “the people” may reflect the electorate’s will.

Recent elections reinforce that suspicion. Voters showed little interest in reclaiming authority from courts or bureaucracies. They appeared far more interested in government largesse and symbolic rights than in the burdens of republican self-rule.

Consider abortion. Roe v. Wade rested on shaky legal ground, yet large segments of the public enthusiastically embraced it for nearly 50 years. When the Roberts Court overturned Roe in 2022 and returned the issue to the states, many voters responded with fury. States enacted expansive abortion laws, and Democrats benefited from unusually high turnout. The electorate did not welcome responsibility. It resented it.

This reaction should not surprise anyone familiar with history. In 1811, Spaniards rejected the liberal constitution imposed by French occupiers, crying “abajo el liberalismo” — down with liberalism. They did not want abstract rights. They wanted familiar authority.

At least half of today’s American electorate appears similarly disposed. Many prefer guided democracy administered by judges and managers to the uncertainties of self-government. Their votes signal approval for continued rule by the administrative state. Republicans may slow this process at the margins, but Democrats expand it openly, and voters just empowered them to do so.

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I anticipated this outcome decades ago. In “After Liberalism” (1999), I argued that democracy as a universal ideal tends to produce expanded managerial control with popular consent. Nineteenth-century fears that mass suffrage would yield chaos proved unfounded. Instead the extension of the franchise coincided with more centralized, remote, and less accountable government.

As populations lost shared traditions and common authority, governance shifted away from democratic participation and toward expert administration. The state grew less personal, less local, and less answerable, even as it claimed to act in the people’s name.

Equally significant has been the administrative state’s success in presenting itself as the custodian of an invented “science of government.” According to this view, administrators form an enlightened elite, morally and intellectually superior to the unwashed masses. Justice Jackson’s warnings reflect this assumption.

I would like to believe, as Harsanyi suggests, that Americans find such attitudes insulting. I am no longer sure they do. Many seem pleased to be managed. They want judges and bureaucrats to make decisions for them.

That preference should trouble anyone who still cares about constitutional government.

This Supreme Court case could reverse a century of bureaucratic overreach



Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

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Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

Justice Jackson Downplays Unelected ‘Experts’ Running The Executive Without Presidential Oversight

Jackson also fearmongered about 'having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the Ph.D.s, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything.'

Can presidents fire all federal bureaucrats at will? Supreme Court to hear case with major implications.



President Donald Trump's work to dismantle the administrative state has reached a tipping point that could have major implications for the future. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments that will determine President Trump's firing power at federal agencies, specifically at the Federal Trade Commission.

On Monday, the court will hear arguments that will challenge a 90-year-old precedent from Humphrey's Executor v. United States.

A Supreme Court decision in President Trump's favor could rewrite the bounds of presidential power over the administrative state.

The case before the court came after President Trump fired Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter over email in March. Trump did not cite any legal reasoning for Slaughter's firing, even though Humphrey's Executor states that an FTC commissioner may be fired only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

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Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

Trump has also fired employees at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Trump has been challenged on other high-profile firings in recent months, including those of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and a copyright official at the Library of Congress, Shira Perlmutter. They have both successfully avoided losing their positions thus far.

Though the FTC is likely to be treated differently because of the precedent, a Supreme Court decision in President Trump's favor could rewrite the bounds of presidential power over the administrative state.

The court currently has a 6-3 conservative majority. Three of the justices were appointed during Trump's first term.

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Trump Admin Is Legally Required To Shut Down The CFPB

The decision marks a turning point for the administrative state and the end of an era for self-funding, self-governing agencies.