An effort to audit the Fed, spearheaded by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, has been gaining momentum since the Republican mid-term election victories this past November. It has, apparently, achieved enough popularity to prompt the folks at the Federal Reserve to comment and push back. Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, testified before a Congressional committee this past week:
I oppose the current version of this bill because it promotes congressional meddling in the Fed’s monetary policy decisions, which risks politicizing those decisions and may have dangerous implications for financial stability and the health of the global economy.
Never mind that the Congress is specifically tasked, in the Constitution, “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereofÉ” Never mind that Congress, not the Federal Reserve, consists of people elected by voters. And, never mind that it’s quite arguable that the Fed’s behavior is already quite political and has been for some time.
Ms. Yellen’s sentiment echoes a broader one that our federal government has become dysfunctional, with poisonous partisan politics causing unprecedented legislative gridlock. President Obama has indicated, many times, that this purported dysfunction is why he’s wielding his “pen and phone” to effect various policies. The President’s supporters often cheer his unilateral actions because they share the belief that Congress is broken and wish he had more power to act as he saw fit. They also cheer unchecked and unilateral actions of agencies under his watch, including the EPA, the IRS and the FCC.
Were this to occur in some other nation, there would be criticisms and laments about how the people are being done unto and subjugated by authoritarian and dictatorial elites. But, because it’s the USA, because people continue to dismiss the thought that the government could turn tyrannical, because “it could never happen here,” and because their guy is the one in charge, the abandonment of the principles of representation and of the checks and balances that are the core of the nation’s system of government are not only accepted, they’re embraced.
This current bout of divided government is presented with great hyperventilation and teeth-gnashing as unprecedented and possibly fatal. It’s used as an excuse for the expansion of executive branch power, for ignoring Congress, for vesting unprecedented power and reach in appointed (i.e. unelected) bureaucrats, and for ignoring the plain text of the law and the decrees of the courts. Divided government (i.e. at least one house of Congress is controlled by a different party than the Presidency), however, isn’t a unique or even rare phenonemon. Since WWII, 24 of 37 “governments” (as demarcated by elections) have been divided, 11 have been all Democratic and 2 have been all Republican. The nation survived all of them.
The nation also survived the ultimate dysfunction – the Civil War. It survived the Great Depression, it survived World War II, it survived graft, corruption and incompetence at all levels of government, throughout history. But now, we are to believe that it cannot survive some gridlock, that the actions the President has unilaterally taken are so vital and so correct that they should not only go unchallenged, they should be cheered? That the partisanship in Congress is such that, rather than have elected representatives watch over the functioning of government, appointed “independent” bureaucrats should act without oversight or transparency? That the FCC should assume control over the Internet by enacting rules that no one in Congress or the public has read?
This is behavior found in banana republics, not in a nation founded on the principles of limited and representative government. It’s not how government is supposed to work. Hyperbole and histrionics aside, it is unnecessary, counterproductive and a terrible, terrible precedent. Some day, the other team’s going to be in power, and when it acts the same way, those who cheered on the current wave of unfettered executive and bureaucratic excess will find themselves crying the blues.
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