Voting is little more than an illusion in this day and age, and federal-level elections are largely ceremonial, according to the findings of a respected academic.
Michael J. Glennon is Professor of International Law at Tufts University. He has recently published a book titled ‘National Security and Double Government.’ In the book, he argues that the federal system never changes at its core, regardless of who is elected. Glennon says this is especially true on the issues of national security and foreign affairs, where the calls for war and centralized government control are seemingly endless.
Glennon is no kook, crackpot or even an outsider. He worked as a consultant to the State Department and served as the legal counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well. His experiences helped to shape his perspective. He knows from his own first-hand experience that the political process at the federal level is not just dysfunctional, but fundamentally broken beyond repair.
In a Boston Globe interview, Glennon sheds light on why he thinks that things have deteriorated by saying:
Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.
Rather than listening to the will of the people, Congress relies on a gaggle of supposed experts receiving paychecks from the military industrial complex to call the shots. These are the type of ‘experts’ who insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was an imminent threat. They also said Ahmadinejad was a terrorist dictator hell bent on destroying Israel, until he left office after a democratic election. It seems like the only thing that you can do to disqualify yourself from being a national security expert in the Beltway is to be accurate with your predictions.
The situation is dire, as Glennon explains:
These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.
We have seen this with the NSA, a secretive bureaucracy operating outside of any accountability and oversight doing permanent damage to our privacy rights. This is the type of behavior our current system is designed to permit. Americans take regulatory bureaucracies in Washington D.C. for granted. Instead they focus all of their attention on Congressmen and other elected officials who come and go.
But what always remains?
The bureaucratic regulatory agencies and their authority. And they only seems to grow with every passing administration.
There are so many rules, regulations, bureaus and red tape on the books in Washington D.C. now that the feds cannot even give the public an official tally. This problem has grown out of control, and threatens our freedom and our prosperity like nothing in our country’s history. America has strayed greatly from its roots as a sovereign, independent nation, leaving a unrecognizable country in shambles in its wake.
Glennon elaborates on this ongoing problem by saying:
The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
Glennon is partially correct here. He is certainly right that the policies cannot be changed through voting for the two major political parties. The people have repeatedly showed up to vote for the Democrats, and put them in power to fix the country.
To no avail.
So, the people went back to the drawing board and voted for the Republicans the next time around.
That has failed as well.
No matter who is elected, things always seem to get worse. All of the problems compound on each other, and neither major party offers any solution other than more power for themselves.
But what the feds don’t want you to know is that there is another way to achieve reforms. We the People can use the massive, inefficient nature of the federal bureaucracy against itself. Thanks to the anti-commandeering doctrine, state and local governments can deny compliance and material support to the federal government for whatever reason they so choose. Because the feds rely on state support in more ways than they would like you to realize, this can pose a huge threat to the continuance of business-as-usual policies in Washington D.C.
The Tenth Amendment Center strategy centers on this reality. We have developed a 4th Amendment Protection Act that can be put into effect in your state to protect you against illegal NSA spying. We have developed a Defend the Guard Act to make it difficult for the National Guard in your state to be deployed in deadly, superfluous wars. In addition, we have created legislation to stop the federal agenda on issues as diverse as Health Care, Money, Drones, Drugs and more. So heed Glennon’s advice and take the “bull by the horns.” Join us, and help us stop the out-of-control regulatory state before time runs out.