June 29, 2020 at 12:44 p.m.
Taking another look at Wisconsin's bureaucracy
Taking another look at Wisconsin's bureaucracy
In Wisconsin, that is doubly true, maybe triply true with Gov. Tony Evers at the helm. Like Barack Obama, and like former Gov. Jim Doyle, Evers is a progressive-style ideologue who views as his chief mission in life the turning over as much power as possible to unelected bureaucrats and left-wing partisans.
Usually, these politicians try to keep such guilty desires to themselves (and from voters), but this year Evers and Democratic governors around the nation got a chance with the COVID-19 pandemic to really unleash the bureaucracy, and they leaped like sheep right over the cliff.
And so, for a moment, until a lucid Supreme Court set things right, the state was run by a public health bureaucrat, one Andrea Palm, the secretary designee of the state Department of Health Services, who grabbed power and proceeded to shut down the economy, ban travel and worship, effectively jail people in their homes, and shred the constitution.
If he was watching from above, old fighting Bob La Follette must have been shedding tears of joy at the triumph of progressive ideology.
Palm's power was illusory, of course, and rested on a twisted reading of her statutory grants of authority. And enough strength was left in the institutional infrastructure of our democratic republic to keep her in check.
But the length to which Democrats have gone nationwide and in Wisconsin to give unelected public health officials the power to unilaterally control personal lives and the economy is both frightening and illustrative of the entrenched power bureaucrats still have in modern America, even after the election of Donald Trump.
This whole lockdown should serve as a reminder of just how much damage unelected officials and their sheepish and beholden elected partisans can do.
To truly understand this power and how it accumulated we must go back a ways in history. There's no doubt that in the early 20th century the nation's and Wisconsin's political machinery was shot through and through with its distinctive flavor of back-room patronage politics.
When La Follette became governor in 1901, he and his progressive counterparts pursued and enacted civil-service reform, which played havoc with the party bosses' patronage machine inside state government. What the civil-service system did politically was ensure that those who ran La Follette's agencies would survive any attempts by succeeding administrations to replace the scientists and experts who carried out functional administrative and economic tasks with political hacks.
Back then, it all worked, to a point.
Unfortunately, civil-service reform was not only a key factor in ending the old systemic corruption, it also played a pivotal role in the rise of today's monstrous bureaucratic power, aka, the new systemic corruption.
First and foremost, the civil service protects jobs. Whereas in the old days that meant career civil servants could carry out nonpartisan, technocratic functions without sweating the interference of patronage cronies, now it means sheltering the most egregious types of political misconduct.
Through the years the growth of activist (read, union-controlled) government combined with civil-service job protections produced a powerful bureaucratic machine whose devotion was not to science but to a righteous leftist ideology, as National Review writer David French once called it.
These days the civil service protects not just the jobs of agency employees but their partisan political biases, too. The system has been turned on its head, with civil service laws now harboring workers who pursue ideological agendas regardless of the will of the voters.
In other words, the civil-service system that was designed to replace the spoils system has now created a new spoils system for the Left, as French put it, and the most recent evidence of their righteous ideology is this year's public health lockdown.
Today, this brazen bureaucratic power comes in two distinct flavors. When conservatives are elected, these partisan ideologues who are supposedly "experts" simply following "science" hunker down in the nooks and crannies of the bureaucracy, their jobs protected by civil-service laws, and wait for better moments.
Meanwhile, they do all they can to muck up the plans of agency leadership appointed by elected conservatives. They sit and whistle and wait, and, oh yeah, write rules to subvert the elected will of the people.
When liberals are elected, those liberals appoint brazen radicals to run the bureaucratic show, and the worker bees of the Left are able to come out of the bee hive in full force.
That's what we have now. At DHS, Evers appointed Palm, who is no public health expert. She has an undergraduate degree in human services studies from Cornell University and a masters in social work but that does not make her an expert in public health. Her long service to Democratic partisans such as Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, does make her an expert in manipulating bureaucratic power for the Left. For example, she picked as one of her top deputies a former vice president of Planned Parenthood.
Things are quickly becoming in Wisconsin what they were under Jim Doyle, when bureaucratic power was immense. Bureaucrats wrote rules with the force and effect of law with impunity, knowing an impotent Legislature could not stop them. Often enough they actually used written rules to subvert the intent of the laws they were supposed to implement.
Through various laws, especially the REINS Act, Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP Legislature returned a lot of that power - some but not nearly enough - to the people. Now, however, we have a different governor, and, presumably, his and Palm's botched attempt to grab power has exposed the intentions of the Left to restore the bureaucracy's former claim to all-encompassing might.
All of this means conservatives need to look hard once again at all the ways the bureaucracy can circumvent the will of the people, and roll up our sleeves and get back to work.
To be sure, the vague statutory public health emergency language that Evers and Palm used to try and seize complete power needs to be rewritten, and it needs to be rewritten for local health officials, too, who - at least until a federal lawsuit is resolved - still have the power to make unilateral lockdown decisions and even overrule local elected officials.
But that's not all. In recent months, we have been shown that the REINS Act itself is much too weak and needs to be strengthened.
The REINS Act was a major step forward because it requires that major rules get affirmative legislative and gubernatorial approval before they take effect, whereas in the old days the Legislature and the governor had to pass legislation to stop a rule - a practical near impossibility in times of divided government, which is most of the time.
But, as we saw this year, the REINS Act has a flaw in that it applies only to rules with a so-called major impact, specifically, those with implementation and compliance costs of $10 million or more over two years.
The problem is, rarely do cost analyses accurately reflect how much the implementation and compliance coats of a rule really are. The second problem is, there are a lot of non-business and policy matters out there - hot-button issues that make a huge difference in people's lives though they may not cost so much in dollars.
One example this year is a proposed DHS rule - yes, the agency is full bore in its power grab - that would mandate meningitis vaccinations for seventh graders. No matter how you actually feel about the vaccination, the way DHS has pursued this rule has been egregious (and another reason Palm should be fired).
For one thing, according to DHS, the proposed meningitis rule would have no implementation or compliance costs, though it seems to us someone would have to pay for all those vaccinations. That question aside, the fiscal analysis consigned the rule to passive review.
Then DHS shut down a public hearing on the rule after just 60 minutes and before many opponents could be heard, prompting an outcry and a second hearing. Then, following the second hearing, a joint legislative rules committee objected 6-2 to the part of the rule that would mandate the meningitis vaccination.
On May 5, the Legislature's Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules concurred in the objections, 6-4, on the grounds that the proposed rule was arbitrary and capricious, and would impose an undue hardship.
However, under the passive rule promulgation process, the formal objection means legislation will now have to be introduced in both the Assembly and the Senate to block the implementation of the contested portions of the rule, and, even if both the Assembly and Senate pass the objections, Gov. Tony Evers could and likely would veto them, allowing the provisions to be promulgated without legislative approval and indeed over its objections.
And so the bureaucracy still rules, with its rules.
Both the under-publicized meningitis edict and the much publicized lockdown are 2020 manifestations of still growing bureaucratic collectivist power in Wisconsin. That power should be stopped and stopped now.
It could be the last chance we get.
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