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Regarding the latest executive order re: independent agencies, I'm struggling to understand why conservatives might think this is a good idea long term. Is the plan to just never lose/hold an election again? It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes. Given that its easier to
create than to destroy[edit: this was a type, I meant "easier to destroy than to create"], that's of course a benefit for anti-welfare conservatives... but direct presidential command over regulation combined with the stance that the president is beholden to nothing but the supreme court seems like a perfect recipe for vindictive actions against corporations and industries that the president doesn't like. And considering the next democratic president is probably going to look much more like the bernie wing of the party than the obama/biden wing of the party, that's a recipe for economic disaster.Necessary disclaimer: I'm a trump-hating neoliberal.
In Austria, we used to have political hiring very far down the chain. This worked fine because every government was a coalition of the two major parties, so we didnt constantly turn them over. It changed eventually, but more so due to the bad optics of patronage and limited meritocracy. Today of course, we do actually change our government - though theres also a good chance well settle into something again in the medium term, and maybe that bit of chaos now would be worth it.
I dont think this flipping is viable long-term. It was fine in the days of Jackson, but today the civil service is much more of a career, and thats not compatible with flipping a coin every 4 years whether youll have a job. It would sooner lead to actually obedient bureaucrats.
But I also dont think the wilder swings in governing ideology are viable. The government just does too much for that. Spending is a third of GDP (plus more effectively commandeered by regulations), redirecting even just a good portion of that every 4-8 years is very destructive, and besides, theres no value in a border closed half the time, or a pension paying out half the time. Ive said this before in the context of election fraud or electoral college discussions, but if a 2% effect can make your government not just different, but really different and unacceptably bad, then you should reconsider whether the one without that small deviation is really legitimate.
So I think this scenario youre describing will be avoided, one way or another. Boringly, by continuation of the status quo pre-Trump. Or interestingly, by a stable orthodoxy that encompasses much more than bureaucrats.
This claim is essentially incompatible with representative government. If the government rules basically the same even when the people want something different, you don't have a democracy or republic, you have some sort of oligarchy or aristocracy.
That touches upon an interesting question, though - to what extent should democratically elected governments be able to constrain the actions of future ones? There is a sliding scale from saying "the previous government's decision to have this separate executive agency be untouchable by future administrations is null and void" to saying "we will not honour contracts or debts taken out by any past government", and each of them could be justified in the same way. If the People are sovereign, why can't they make a sovereign decision to renege on a contract? Of course, if you did that, the government would find it much harder to get anyone or anything to trust it and sign a contract with it in the future. Of course, you could then argue that a truly sovereign people should take the L and make it a learning experience (and maybe next time consider to vote for contracts made in their name to be honoured even if they have come to hate the guy who they empowered to make them). That might be fine philosophically, but in reality no major country's people may actually have sufficient collective executive function to learn that lesson. As a result, the perfect democracy, as philosophically appealing as it may be, would be outcompeted by other countries running a kayfabe democracy that somewhat insulates the people from their stupidity. Are you ready to make that experiment with your own country on the line?
In the US, the rule is very much closer to the latter. In law, this is the rule against "legislative entrenchment", often expressed as "the current legislature may not bind the future legislature". As far as I know, no one has seriously questioned whether the equivalent rule applies to the executive. The US Government may be bound by treaty or constitutional amendment, but not much else.
The alternative being that the bureaucracy runs the government, "Yes Minister" style? Yes.
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