The White House and the Swamp

So now, Steve Bannon is no longer in the White House as a chief strategist to President Trump.  That was coming, no doubt, and the removal a couple weeks back is not the first under Gen. Kelly, the chief of staff, and won't be the last -- probably.

Donald Trump, the candidate, ran on the notion that he wanted to "drain the swamp" -- a term that I don't know that a lot of people understood, and I'm sure that even Trump himself didn't necessarily appreciate the magnitude and impossibility of the task until he had been there a while.

I lived and worked in the DC area for many decades.  I have a plenty-good-enough notion of what that swamp is, and it has a few parts to it, in no specific order.

First, there is the entrenchment of Congress.  Many court rulings that mandated majority-minority districts (on the sad, bigoted notion that only, say, a Latino can represent a mostly-Latino population; only a black could represent a mostly-black population -- you get the idiocy) have created such districts as being less diverse and more likely to elect more leftist Democrats and more conservative Republicans.

That leaves us with more extreme, longer-serving congressmen, getting better committee assignments and chairmanships, and puts less-accommodating, less willing-to-compromise congressmen in charge.

Second, there is the Deep State.  That is a fun term for a sadly-real situation.  The Federal Government, as currently constituted (read: "bloated"), has hundreds of thousands of employees in DC.  Few of those go away after a change in administrations, and even those who do, such as Cabinet secretaries, leave a couple layers of political appointees below them, among the thousands who need to get Senate confirmation of a successor before they are replaced.

John Koskinen, the contemptible political hack who ran the IRS during the Obama years, is still running the IRS.  You think somehow that he actually agrees with his chief executive on anything related to the IRS and its doings?  But it is seven months into the Trump Administration and the guy is still there, even after a censuring by Congress.  And his is an appointed position.

The Deep State is meant to reflect the tens of thousands whose careers are in the Federal government, senior enough to have influence on policy and who (after an eight-year administration) are likely to have only had their senior roles under a president completely different in policy from the one they now serve.  That means that the current president's will is likely to be soft-pedaled or even subverted by everyone in senior positions in his government, except for the Cabinet and the few Cabinet-agency deputies who have gotten through the Senate while Chick Schumer is slow-rolling the process.

That, friends, is a big part of the swamp.  That kind of influence, between the entrenchment in the legislative branch and the entrenchment in the not-quite-most-senior levels of the executive branch, is huge.  In both cases, their influence raises the value of access to them by the contracting industry, which in turn increases their influence to another level.  It's the kind of access that, in the case of the Defense Department, Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the "military-industrial complex", a not-so-healthy relationship between the public and private sectors.

That's power, and no one relinquishes power readily.  You think any of those Deputy Undersecretaries from the Obama years are rushing to go find new jobs when it's going to take months and months to replace them?

So, the White House.

It seems a curious thing, but when I see the people coming and going inside the White House staff, I have to think of the swamp.  I would like to see Gen. Kelly get rid of the influencers in the White House who are keeping the place from running smoothly.  Admittedly, Bannon was the one with the list of the president's legislative priorities, but he was a lightning rod, and either way he was simply not being effective at advancing them.

I think that the good general should be -- and most certainly is -- doing his own form of managing the agenda by thinning the ranks and reorganizing (and restaffing) with people whose principal reason for being there is to advance this president's agenda, executive and legislative both.  Anyone not on board is a swamp denizen, and needs to be, well, drained.

Here's hoping.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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