DeSantis Vows War on the Deep State

Famously, when he was elected governor, he had all of his staff research all powers of the governor, even the ones that have been forgotten about, because he intended to use every last one of them.

So he's not blowing smoke when he says he intends to use presidential power to the limit to dismantle the Deep State.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a "Day One" strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system.

The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a "disciplined" and "relentless" strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the "Founding Fathers envisioned."

But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

"We're not going to let all this power accumulate in Washington, we're going to break up these agencies," DeSantis said during a private strategy session over the weekend, excerpts of which were obtained exclusively by RCP. He vowed in that call to order "some of the problematic components of the DOJ" be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly "shipped to other parts of the country."

This fits with one of the central themes of the DeSantis campaign, namely that he'd be "an energetic executive," a president with the focus and attention to detail necessary to make the most of his Article II powers. On the stump, the governor regularly wins applause from primary voters for promising not just to wage war on the so-called deep state, but to end it.

The goal, according to senior outside advisors, ought to be returning the DOJ and FBI to a more limited "pre-9/11" mission. Republicans were outraged last Friday when former President Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents. DeSantis has condemned that move, and his campaign scheduled the Saturday conference call "not knowing," he told advisors, that there would be "news last night." But the governor is also intimately familiar with conservative gripes about political bias inside President Biden's Department of Justice. They have been central to his campaign.

"We've seen throughout this country that the DOJ and the FBI are controlled by one faction of our society," DeSantis said on the call, pointing to how those agencies were "going after pro-life activists," wrongfully investigating parents at school board meetings "who are concerned about things like critical race theory, and forcing kids to wear masks," and "colluding with tech companies to censor information such as what they did with the 2020 election."

DeSantis has assembled a brain trust of academics, members of Congress, and former administration officials to draw up step-by-step blueprints for tearing the DOJ and FBI down to the studs for a rebuild.

He consults frequently with Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas, conservatives always at war with government bureaucracy and openly hostile to federal power. Steven Bradbury of the Heritage Foundation and Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution have also joined the working group to offer technical expertise and historical perspective.

This is a cruel move, and I approve.

There have been regular conference calls, detailed memos, and at least one policy retreat in Tallahassee earlier this year. The work is ongoing because their enemy, the so-called "deep state," is vast. Their aim is nothing short of crippling it once and for all.

A key feature of the emerging plan: Move fast. Don't wait on Congress.

Bradbury has placed particular emphasis on that point during discussions with the candidate. An alum of both the Bush and Trump administrations, the former assistant attorney general told DeSantis that not only could he "relocate the FBI headquarters" without legislation from Congress, but he could also eliminate and then consolidate the bureau's general counsel, public affairs, and government relations offices with existing divisions in the DOJ.

Bradbury has suggested that such a move would both limit opportunities for the FBI to meddle in political affairs and also "beef up and emphasize the field offices."

This kind of innovation suits DeSantis, who takes a broader view of executive authority than is typical of constitutional conservatives and who has told advisors he "doesn't buy" the idea that presidents can't fire anyone on the federal payroll. He makes little distinction between political appointees, such as FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the federal government's career employees, a workforce numbering 35,000 at the FBI alone. "If you're performing poorly, you should be fired," he said, referring to special protections for a legion of federal civil servants. "It doesn't matter if you're a bureaucrat, or if you're a political appointee."

DeSantis knocked Trump's promise to "tame the Deep State in six months," asking why it wasn't done during Trump's four year term. He also points out that a re-elected president Trump would be a one-term president and therefore a lame duck. He would have much less power to punish recalcitrant GOP senators, and the Deep State could just wait him out for four years.

posted by Ace at 01:16 PM

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