A Deep State Impeachment
President Trump’s impeachment has been inevitable ever since the Democrats captured the House of Representatives. Senior Democrats know it is a political blunder, but they have no choice: the party’s base demands it. It is politics, pure and simple, and most Americans perceive that. President Trump’s actions have nothing to do with it.
In fact, the evidence so far should put Joe Biden in worse jeopardy than President Trump. When Biden was Vice President under President Obama, he threatened to block a billion dollars of loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Ukraine’s president fired the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Why would Vice President Biden have cared who Ukraine had as its Prosecutor General? It appears a big Ukraine gas company, Burisma, feared Mr. Shokin was about to investigate it for corruption--which he would have found, because everything in Ukraine is corrupt. Again, what was this to Vice President Biden? Well, it seems his son was a board member of Burisma, a position for which he was paid as much as $50,000 a month, an extraordinary amount for just serving on a board. But in this case, the money seems to have been well spent, because Mr. Shokin was duly fired and Burisma was not investigated.
President Trump’s sin, for which the House will now vote to impeach him, was asking Ukraine’s current president to look into the matter. Logic would suggest that if President Trump is to be impeached, the House should also vote to impeach Mr. Biden the day after his inauguration, should he be elected in 2020. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that.
But something bigger is going on here. The basis on which the Democrat-controlled House voted to begin an impeachment investigation was a whistle-blower complaint from a CIA employee, presumably a civil servant, and almost certainly a senior civil servant, given that he had worked in the White House. But should a President of the United States, when speaking by phone with another country’s leader, have to worry about who is listening in--not from China or Russia, but people who are supposedly working for him who then run to Congress with information intended to destroy that President?
What we are witnessing is a Deep State impeachment. The Washington arm of the Deep State is made up largely of middle and upper-grade members of the Civil Service. They are mostly card-carrying members of the Establishment. They accept globalism and, out of either conviction or cowardice, cultural Marxism. They see themselves as members of an elite membership in which certain political views are required. President Trump, who comes from the populist Right, represents everything they loath. They see it as their collective mission to destroy him, and they will sabotage him and everything he tries to do in any way they can. They will do the same to any successor who comes from the populist Right.
From a conservative perspective, if we are ever to be able to govern effectively, we must destroy at least this wing of the Deep State. If we do not, winning elections will matter little. The question is, how?
The best way would be to return most of the powers the federal government has seized since 1860 to the states. State governments too have a large portion of employees who share the Deep State’s worldview and objectives. But because state bureaucracies are smaller, it is easier to identify and dismiss the saboteurs. Unfortunately conservatives have been attempting for decades to shrink the size of the federal government, without success. Until the debt crisis and resultant depression hits, that is unlikely to happen.
But here’s something that might work. The Washington members of the Deep State are mostly very well paid. Like the members of the Frankfurt School who created cultural Marxism, they insist on combining their Leftist views with a haute bourgeois lifestyle, which takes money. Their ample salaries and good benefits packages are paid for by American taxpayers, most of whom have far smaller incomes. In effect, we are financing the elites that despise us.
So let’s change that. A populist measure I think would prove very effective would rule that no civil servant can be paid more than the average American taxpayer makes. The worker bees in the Civil Service would see little change. But the vast middle management, where people like our whistle-blower spin their webs, would have to choose between serving what they believe in and their expensive lifestyles. My bet is they would quit in droves (while Washington real estate value went through the floor).
When corporations become stuffy, stodgy, and unable to adjust to change, a common approach of new owners is to clean out the middle management, not just firing most of its people but also not replacing them, thereby shrinking their ranks. The new, streamlined organization is not only less expensive, it performs better because the people who do the work are no longer separated from the owners by a vast, wet blanket of bureaucracy.
If conservatives are serious about changing national policy, it is not enough to fight individual alligators. We do have to drain the swamp, the swamp that is the Deep State. Firing civil servants is extremely difficult. But creating conditions where they choose to depart might prove easier, and politically popular. Mr. President, may I suggest this could be an effective way to strike back at the saboteurs in what should be your own ranks? Here in Cleveland, most people would like to see you try.