The news is abuzz about Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, landing in intensive care for 4 days and not telling anyone – including his boss. The news got even more alarming when we learned that the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico while Austin was incapacitated. That is a chain of leadership breach which is unacceptable for a nuclear superpower.
Of course, this lapse of leadership happened to an administration in which the Secretary of Transportation took 2 months off for “his” maternity leave, and the President has spent almost 40 percent of his time napping on the beach while a myriad of global crises failed to rise to the “cancel vacation” level.
What does it mean when an essential employee (like a President or cabinet secretary) stops doing his essential work for days on end, and nobody notices? Does it mean that those elected to govern us, aren’t really governing anything? Has our federal bureaucracy become a hive of worker bees – with no central leadership, but with individuals instinctively working for the health of the bureaucracy?
Individual bees have little regard for their own wellbeing. However, put a thousand of them together, and each will gladly sacrifice itself for the welfare of the hive. The colony becomes fiercely protective of the hive.
How self-protective has our colony of 2.9 million federal employees become? Do they go about their business of expanding and protecting the hive, regardless of the guidance provided by our elected representatives? Have our bureaucrats become members of the Washington hive first, and Americans second? Do they instinctively protect the bureaucracy – regardless of what is best for America?
Does the hive merely fill a leadership vacuum left by absent politicians, or does it resist external leadership entirely? Our last President was an outsider sent to Washington to lead the bureaucracy. Was he in control when
- The FBI surveilled him and set a perjury trap for his National Security Advisor?
- Department of Justice initiated the Mueller investigation, and the Deputy Attorney General offered to “wear a wire” in a sting operation against the President?
- A Lt. Col. in the Army decided his Ukrainian foreign policy superseded that of the President?
- The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs contacted his Chinese counterpart and assured them that he would undermine legal orders from his Commander in Chief?
The hive perceived our last elected leader as a threat, and is still frenetically stinging those who might send someone like him back to Washington. When a Washington prosecutor bee asks a jury of bees to sting a January 6 defendant, they respond instinctively and aggressively – with guilty verdicts for virtually every charge. Evidence and the rule of law are apparently irrelevant when the welfare of the hive is at stake.
Has control of the government through elections become an illusion? Is Washington simply allowing us our fantasy of self-governance, while it advances the interests of the hive? What if the “Big Brother” of Orwell’s 1984 dystopia wasn’t a person or a computer, but was rather a neural network of millions of bureaucratic synapses working in harmony to serve the hive, rather than the citizens? Would it look different from what we are witnessing now?
If the public came to the realization that “Big Brother” was a menace, to what lengths would our master go to protect itself? Would it
- Deny us our electoral choices – to defend democracy?
- Censor our freedom of expression – to protect us from disinformation?
- Steal our property rights – to spread the wealth around?
- Deluge us with propaganda – to protect us from wrong-think?
- Cancel our freedom of association – to prevent insurrection?
- Undermine our freedom of religion – because religion is a crutch to the oppressed?
- Attempt the removal of our elected “leadership” – because they are dangerous?
- Prosecute and imprison non-criminals – because they are a greater threat than Islamic terrorism?
The hive would surely like us to maintain the illusion of self-governance. While we burn our energy on Democrat/Republican mudslinging, political organizing, and voting for figureheads which the hive will ignore; it continues its inexorable expansion of reach and power unabated.
If our electoral choices no longer matter, let’s do something completely unexpected. Let’s constrain the hive Constitutionally rather than electorally. The second clause of Article V gives the states the power to reign in the federal government, via the amendment process, with no federal consent. But that power has an approaching expiration. It only exists while the Constitution has power.
The Supreme Court is the only remaining branch of the federal government which still honors the Constitution – by a slim 5-3-1 (originalist, revisionist, negotiable) margin. The court is only one death or retirement away from becoming an activist court which will render the Constitution meaningless. When that happens, time will have run out to peacefully bring the hive to heel.
