It’s always hilarious watching Big Government advocates selectively whine about access to this or that government process.
Because they almost always do it exactly backwards.
To wit: This just happened:
“(T)he (Donald Trump Administration's) General Services Administration (GSA) quietly removed a tool from Regulations.gov that allows advocacy groups and other third-party organizations to collect and submit public comments to federal agencies.
"Removing this tool – the POST Application Programming Interface (API) – makes it much harder for individuals and small businesses to weigh in on agency regulatory proposals.
"Katie Tracy, senior regulatory policy advocate for Public Citizen, issued the following statement:
“‘Notice and comment is one of the few opportunities most Americans and small businesses have to shape regulations by telling agency officials how proposed rules benefit or hurt them. Removing the POST API sends a clear message that the Trump administration does not want public input on its actions.’”
These Big Gov advocates are whining about losing an online tool for the Public Comment periods run by the bureaucracies.
By unelected-and-thus-unaccountable bureaucrats. Who are writing regulations that almost never have anything to do with actual legislation passed by elected-and-thus-(ostensibly)-accountable members of Congress.
Fake Democracy, Real Power Grabs: The Bureaucracy ‘Comment Periods’:
“(O)ut of the vast, ever-expanding Executive Branch - arose the bureaucratic power grab.
“The Executive Branch is made up of a laundry list, alphabet soup of acronym agencies - filled to the rafters with bureaucrats. Who over the last several decades have spent less and less time implementing laws - and more and more time pretending to be legislators and writing them. Which they disguise as ‘regulations.’
“To make these power grabs appear less power grabby, the agencies have devised the rule-making process - during which they have ‘Comment Periods.’ Where the Executive again pretends to be the Legislative. This is their lame attempt to replicate our ‘petition(ing) the Government to redress our grievances.’”
We Less Gov advocates would like to stop these unelected bureaucrats from writing laws. And thereby render the Comment Periods inert. They’re already exceedingly stupid:
“The Comment Periods - are just dumb. Again, these bureaucrats aren’t elected. And they are under no obligation whatsoever to have the comments you file - affect at all what they're about to do to you.
“If the comments favor the power grab they are about to execute? They trumpet the results, and move forward as planned. If the comments oppose? They ignore the results, and move forward as planned.
“And this nonsense allows for much additional nonsense by outside pro-government Leftist groups. They get to turn the Democracy Theater - into Kabuki Theater. They enlist their armies of uninformed nonsense-spewers to spew their nonsense into the comment process.”
And now it’s gotten a little less easy for them to spew their nonsense. “Our Democracy™ is in peril!!!”
We regular people would instead prefer DC get back to having our elected legislators legislate. And ONLY our elected legislators. Because that’s how it’s actually supposed to work:
“The officials we elect to the Legislative Branch - legislate. They draft and pass laws. On which We the People can exert influence - via our First Amendment right ‘to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ The President (whom we also elect) then signs the laws - and then his/her Executive Branch executes them.”
Get that? The Executive Branch EXECUTES the laws. It does NOT write them. It’s almost as if it’s called the Executive Branch on purpose.
This distinction-with-a-difference has been ignored by bureaucrats for decades. Throughout the government’s 456+ bureaucracies.
And yes, the Constitution specifically says we can lobby “Government.” Which, to be fair, would include the elected Congress - and the unelected bureaucrats.
Except the guys who wrote the Constitution didn’t empower anyone but the elected Congress to write laws. Anyone else doing so would be unConstitutional. So petitioning anyone else almost certainly never occurred to the guys with the quills.
And while the Big Gov advocates are whining about slightly diminished access to the unelected bureaucrats unconstitutionally writing laws?
They are demanding we have almost no access to the elected officials constitutionally writing laws.
Here again is the aforementioned Public Citizen:
Lobbying Reform:
“(W)hen the lobbying profession becomes too closely tied to money, it can lead to corruption. Meaningful lobbying reform should protect the right of all persons to lobby but attempt to break the potentially corrupting nexus between lobbyists, money and lawmakers.”
And by money, they mean….
“Public Citizen has long been committed to bringing about comprehensive campaign finance reform. The best and most comprehensive reform is voluntary public financing of all federal elections where candidates have strong incentives to replace private money with public funding.”
So what Public Citizen and all the like-mindless Big Gov advocates want? Is no one but government funding government elections.
Except we have seen for decades with National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Government money recipients protect government. Want to turn a watchdog into a lapdog? Have the government buy the dog food.
And these Big Gov advocates want the people in office? In charge of all the funding for their opponents. Because that won’t taint the elections process at all.
And you thought gerrymandering was an incumbent-protection racket.
So in summary:
The Big Gov advocates want to maximize irrelevant speech for unconstitutional government actions.
And eliminate relevant speech for constitutional government actions.
The only thing consistent about those two things?
They both make it much easier to make government much bigger.
Of course, the only actual campaign finance reform? Is to reduce the size of government. Rendering it less worthy of money and attention.
You pay protection money to the UFC world champion. You don’t pay it to the president of the Chess Club.
We need a WAY more Chess Club-y government.