“All legislative Powers herein granted” – The Only Way President Trump Can Defeat The Deep State

When I was just starting my third year of law school, I decided to skip my Federal Courts class to attend a devotional at the school’s events center located at the base of the mountains on a beautiful Tuesday morning in September 1986. I had read in the school newspaper that Ezra Taft Benson was coming to speak there in order to celebrate the commemoration of the Bi-centennial Anniversary Year of the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Benson had been a member of the Eisenhower Cabinet and was known for his outspoken conservative views. At the time, he was President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Confessedly, even though I was a law student at the time, I had no idea that September 17, 1987 marked the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and that we were going to celebrate the anniversary as a nation. I had only learned of the occasion from the student newspaper and, since our law schools were woefully deficient in teaching anything about the Framers and the history behind our founding, I decided to attend the devotional instead of law class with the expectation that I would learn something significant about the founding from someone who was known for his staunch allegiance to our Constitution.

There were plenty of moments during his speech in which I gained valuable insights, truths, and principles all of which have influenced the rest of my life, but I will only mention one of them in this article. This one truth actually contradicted much of what I had actually been learning in my Federal Courts class, and I felt determined to question my professor about the seeming inconsistencies.

“In recent years,” Mr. Benson explained, “we have allowed Congress to fund numerous federal agencies. While these agencies may provide some needed services and protection of rights, they also encroach significantly on our constitutional rights. The number of federal agencies seems to grow continually to regulate and control the lives of millions of citizens. What many fail to realize is that most of these federal agencies are unconstitutional. Why are they unconstitutional? They are unconstitutional because they concentrate the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches under one head. They have, in other words, power to make rulings, enforce rulings, and adjudicate penalties when rulings are violated. They are unconstitutional because they represent an assumption of power not delegated to the executive branch by the people. They are also unconstitutional because the people have no power to recall administrative agency personnel by their vote.”[1]

When I attended law school, it was not the “snowflake” experience in which we see most campuses operating today. My experience emulated the atmosphere portrayed in the movie Paper Chase wherein the professors ruled their classrooms like tyrants, and the students feared to even speak up – such was the environment I walked into the next day in my Federal Courts class. I waited for a break in the professor’s lecture to tepidly raise my hand. When the professor acknowledged me, I spoke with a bit of a quiver in my voice to ask the professor if it was not appropriate to discuss the speech yesterday from Mr. Benson since we were in a Church-owned university, and he was the President of the Church.

The professor hesitated, looking around at the class, and then turning her focus back to me, she admitted that she had not attended the devotional and, therefore, had no opinion on the matter. Glancing back up, she surveyed the room once more, and asked if anyone else had gone to the meeting. No one raised their hand. It felt like she was trying to make a point – my question was actually not an appropriate topic for class discussion.

She then flipped her head back towards me and began speaking with an obvious tone of impatience, “well, apparently no one else bothered to attend as well, so if you want to have a discussion about it, you are going to have to tell us what you want to discuss.” I really did not want to say anything else, but knew that I needed to say something, so I stammered out the words that “we had been learning about the significance of administrative courts in class but Mr. Benson said yesterday that administrative agencies were unconstitutional.”

With that, the entire class erupted into loud jeers and laughter. Even the professor started laughing at me. The roaring of that raucous crowd seemed to go on for at least five minutes, if not longer, until the professor finally called the class back to order. When the humiliating jeers finally ended, the professor focused her angst on me once more and declared in her most authoritative tone that “Mr. Benson doesn’t know what he is talking about as he clearly doesn’t understand constitutional law.” I could still hear the muffled snickers coming from all around me, as the professor’s uncomfortable gaze lingered long enough to assert her dominance over me. Finally, she asked me if there was anything else I needed to discuss. I had already sunk low into my seat and could barely muster up the response, “No thank you, professor.”

This experience took place nearly 38 years ago in what many would consider to be a very conservative religious university. I have reflected on that moment many times over the years and wished that I had stood up to the jeers. Unfortunately, I was without any real knowledge on such matters and was unable to fight back against the liberal philosophies corrupting our educational institutions at that time.

Fortunately, many people have awakened to our desperate situation. We are now at the point where we have a candidate for the U.S. Presidency making this issue one of his main concerns. President Trump vowed in 2023 that “We will demolish the deep state.” One reporter clarified what President Trump meant about the deep state – “Perhaps the most important but also perhaps the most difficult to implement among the various initiatives is a thorough detox of the administration state, or the ‘swamp’ and ‘deep state,’ as Trump puts it.”[2]

The article then went on to describe how massive this administrative state has become – “Nearly two million federal government employees in federal agencies comprise the administrative state. . . The federal bureaucracy remains in place with the capacity to thwart political agendas championed by the president.”[3]

Another recent article about the administrative state that basically validates what Ezra Taft Benson said 38 years earlier stated – “The administrative state holds significant institutional power because elected federal lawmakers essentially abdicated their responsibility.”[4]

Mr. Benson was also vindicated in another more recent article where the reporter argues that “The term ‘administrative state’ specifically describes the phenomenon of unaccountable and unelected administrative agencies, including the national security apparatus, exercising power to create and enforce their own rules. The administrative state uses its rule-making ability to essentially usurp the separation of powers between the three branches of government by creating a so-called fourth branch of government not formed by the Constitution.”[5] There it is – “They are unconstitutional” just like Mr. Benson claimed all those years ago much to the chagrin of my Federal Courts class professor, I’m sure.

This administrative nightmare has become so entrenched and so powerful that more than half of the United States can see it, and they have all come to hate it as they now refer to it as “the DC swamp.”

The very first line of the Constitution states emphatically that “ALL legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”[6] (emphasis added) In other words, no other branch of government has any legislative authority, since ALL legislative power is granted to Congress.

Hamilton gave us the definition of legislative power under the Constitution – “The essence of the legislative authority is to enact laws, or, in other words, to prescribe rules for the regulation of the society.”[7] According to the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA), this is exactly what administrative agencies do. They prescribe rules that regulate our society whether it be our environment, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the medicine we use, the air that we breathe, the information we consume, and so on.

Yet, there is simply NO constitutional legislative authority granted to the executive branch. We have allowed our corrupt politicians to pass a law facilitating administrative agencies with the ability to enact legislation all the time with their administrative rules. By calling them rules, they have gaslighted the public into believing that they are somehow different than making law, but the Framers were very clear. A rule that is used to regulate society is the very essence of legislative power, so the executive branch has no constitutional authority to be involved in rulemaking.

According to Hamilton, the very essence of the executive branch is “the execution of the laws, and the employment of the common strength . . .”[8] The executive cannot constitutionally make rules that govern society. The executive branch can only execute the laws that Congress makes, and it exerts the common strength of the nation.

In addition to making law, under the APA, administrative agencies also have administrative courts to interpret their own rules. What this means is, just as Mr. Benson warned back in 1986, administrative agencies are unconstitutional because they exercise all three powers of government – they make law, they interpret their own laws, and they enforce those laws. This is, as Madison explained, the “very definition of tyranny.”[9]

This is the real reason why the IRS is such a feared organization. They make the law. They interpret the law. They execute the law. They act as tyrants, and the citizens are helpless to fight them alone. Up until recently, no one has even tried to call out these abuses – except for 38 years ago when Mr. Benson did acting as a lone voice. President Trump claims that he will “drain the DC swamp.” This clarion call resonates with so many Americans because they have been suffering under the tyrannical dictates of these unconstitutional administrative agencies for far too long in silence and alone.

The only problem with President Trump’s promise to drain the Swamp is his record. When he was in office, he tried draining the Swamp by requiring them to cut back on the number of rules they promulgated, but this will never work. He will never succeed just telling them to stop making so many rules. They have to stop making law altogether.

There is only one way to drain the Swamp and that is to do exactly what Congressman Thomas Massie recently tried to do with the Federal Reserve. He introduced legislation “to repeal the Federal Reserve Act.”[10]

If President Trump is serious about destroying the Deep State, he must destroy the Deep State by getting Congress to repeal the APA. There is NO other way to drain the Swamp except to repeal the APA and make government conform to the Separation of Powers between the different branches. Otherwise, it will just be business as usual among the corrupt DC politicians, which always ends the same way – more accumulation of power into the hands of the administrative state and more repression and less freedoms for the American people.

Madame Publius

---

[1] Benson, Ezra Taft, The Constitution: A Heavenly Banner, 16 September 1986.

[2] https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/05/01/time-magazine-interview-trump-renews-pledge-to-purge-administrative-state/

[3] Id.

[4] https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/05/01/time-magazine-interview-trump-renews-pledge-to-purge-administrative-state/

[5] https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/05/17/biden-bureaucracy-prepares-trump-win-fast-tracking-leftist-rules/

[6] US CONST. Art. §1.

[7] Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, Ltr. 75, ¶3.

[8] Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, Ltr. 75, ¶2.

[9]“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Madison, The Federalist Papers, Ltr. 47, ¶3.

[10] https://massie.house.gov/uploadedfiles/endthefed.pdf