Czared To Death

von Rum apologizes for his tardiness in posting.

John McCain remarked that Obama now has more Czar’s than the Romanov’s. Sadly this is true.

Beginning with the Energy Czar under Nixon and the Drug Czar under Reagan, US Presidents have shown an inclination to create posts of all encompassing power answerable only to themselves. All have done it, though Obama has carried it to new heights.

We now have Czars of Drugs, Cars, Bank Bailouts, the Middle East, the US border, and most recently a Cyber Czar to being policing of the internet. In all there are over 20 of these appointed officials.

The most disturbing thing about them are their extra-Constitutionality. They are not subject to confirmation by the Senate as Cabinet members are. The Cabinet has traditionally been the seat of such oversight officers. These, along with the head of the CIA and the Pentagon officers have been accountable to Congress and as such indirectly to the citizens. The new Czarist officials are not similarly accountable.

This gathering of power into the hands of a few unelected and uncontrolled people answerable only to the President is a terrible precedent. It smacks of despotism and is nothing more than a further engorgement of the Imperial Presidency.

It has been argued that the Czars create more efficient problem solving because they are outside and above the traditional archaic bureaucracy in Washington. This is hogwash. The in fact create more bureaucrats and more turf wars multiplying the hands in the pot and the costs of each effort to solve anything. They are in fact the opposite of efficiency. The fact that many of them are also overseeing areas of American life never meant to be the prerogative of the Federal government is even more insidious.

Even the king of pork, Senator Robert Byrd D-WV has had the foresight to condemn the practice of appointing Czars. He wrote to Obama that the system, “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances,”. He also complained that it gives the President too much power. The strange thing is that Obama complained about that very thing as a candidate. He claimed the Bush White House had used executive privileges to accrue too much power. He called for transparency. His hypocrisy in appointing all these unaccountable executives to their fiefdoms is staggering.

In less than five months Barack Obama has gathered to himself more executive power than George W. Bush could in eight years. Change has been called for and delivered. We have changed presidents from an incompetent quasi-liberal Bush to a skilled messianic socialist with, at best delusions of grandeur and at worst a despotic streak that threatens the Republic.

A century of steadily increasing the power of the executive branch of government at the expense of the accountability and oversight of the Congress has gotten us here. This combined with an election system that smacks of corruption and an insulated political class have created a gulf between life in America and life in Washington D.C.

This is the cause of the strange irony that as the power of the Federal government has grown our respect for and support of that government has dropped precipitously. In 1916 the greatest contact that most Americans had with the Federal government or Federal law was the Post Office. The respect for Uncle Sam was great because it was distant. When he is in your living room every day then he, like guests and fish, begins to smell. Familiarity does not breed contempt, it is contempt.

Hail Caesar!