Wednesday, February 07, 2018

What Constitutional Crisis?

By Michael Rozeff

What’s all this loose talk about a constitutional crisis? One source is John Brennan, the same John Brennan who was the top man in the CIA for 4 years. Forget his credentials. He has an axe to grind. Credentials of government officials do not coincide with wisdom, accuracy, truth and understanding. Brennan has joined NBCNews where he can be paid for spouting all sorts of gibberish and anti-Trump ramblings.

Don’t believe this guy. On the issue at hand, which is intel agencies interfering in the 2016 election, he’s way off track. He has accused Nunes of abusing his power. He’s blasted Republicans for releasing the House memo on the FBI dereliction of duty and interference in the election process. He’s said that the House GOP could be complicit in obstruction of justice. He’d rather have the intel agencies obstructing justice, it appears.
Brennan is going to these extremes because he holds so dear the impervious shield around these agencies so that they can supposedly buy us ordinary folk “national security”. What he doesn’t say is that such a shield goes against and itself undermines the American form of government. It builds up unaccountable power centers that can be used in unaccountable ways by those in Congress and the Executive. They turn government into a police state, a surveillance state, a national security state, and a state prone to war. These agencies form a government segment that may exercise great power over citizens.

Any state is designed from the get-go to hold, promote and expand power. Its dedication to justice, rights and property is the least possible that it can display in order to maintain enough legitimacy so that it can tend to its central nature, which revolves entirely around power and its growth. By aligning with powerful intel agencies, Brennan is on the side of the state. He is not on the side of justice, even within the election process.
Brennan wants Republicans to lay off. Brennan says “I think we are going to be in a very serious Constitutional crisis. I wonder when the Republican leadership in the Congress is going to come to their senses.” He’s simply defending the intel agencies by attacking any openness from Republicans. He’d prefer to see the whole 2016 election investigation go away or be buried forever.

Can we be crystal clear about what is going on? For a long, long time, the Congress has created powerful agencies and delegated powers to them. The Supreme Court has found them to be constitutional. We libertarians know that they are no damn good, but they are there. These agencies all have high agency costs, meaning Congress has a lot of trouble controlling their creations and we the people are left out in the cold as the agencies constantly misuse their powers.

Now, in the last election, a number of officials in these agencies are implicated in activities that are illegal. Furthermore, the trail leads back to Obama and Hillary Clinton. Congressional investigations haven’t gone there yet, but they have gone to persons in the agencies, especially the FBI. All that’s happening is that one part of Congress, mainly the Republican part, and not even all of that part, is attempting to exercise some control over its creations, these intel agencies, and right now specifically the FBI. There is no crisis of the Constitution involved at all.

Why are these Republicans bothering to investigate? It’s because the Democrats made a bid to end the oligopoly of two-party rule and turn it into a monopoly of Democratic rule. If Hillary had been elected and re-elected 4 years later, it would have meant establishing a Democratic majority that might be in power for decades more. It could do this by immigration methods that tip the balance to their side, or by other methods.

This is a squabble or power struggle within the federal government. The Republican contingent, or some of it, is up in arms because the Democratic contingent stepped over the line in the 2016 election in an attempt to win the election. They Republicans cannot let this go unaddressed if they want their party to survive. The Democrats, sure of their constituency and media dominance, do not seem to be worried about the American people losing faith in the whole system or in them. Therefore, they are continuing their obstruction and anti-Trump campaign.

Brennan is aligning himself with the Democrats in all of his criticisms and in crying wolf. This is because he is fully aligned with the intel agencies and not with their current most open critics, who are Republican. Years ago, he expressed himself similarly: “In February 2010, he claimed on Meet the Press that he was tired of Republican lawmakers using national security issues as political footballs, and making allegations where they did not know the facts.”

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

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