Andy Kroll
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's a real pleasure to be here.
Russ Vogt believes that federal agencies are one of the chief reasons that, in his view, the American government has ceased to serve the American people and that it has become this rogue system.
bureaucracy, where there are civil servants who are unelected and who have their own agendas.
They, in his belief, ignore the president and carry out this plan, these policies, these rules and regulations that, again, in Russ Vogt's view, have become completely untethered from the will of the president and then the people who elected that president.
And he wants to
to rip out as much of that bureaucracy as he possibly can.
He calls it the deep state.
He deeply believes that as he put it in a different part of that Tucker Carlson interview, that the bureaucracy in the American government hates, to use his term, the American people and has to be eliminated.
It certainly would be a major break from how our three-part system of government has operated for quite a long time.
And it would certainly be a break in terms of what the president is now doing as it relates to Congress from the plain text of the Constitution itself.
What I'm talking about here is the Article I authority that Congress has, number one job that Congress has, the power of the purse.
Pass the laws with funding to implement those laws.
as anyone who has done a cursory read of the Constitution knows, says that the president must take care to implement those laws faithfully.
Russ Vogt has a very different theory of this case.
As he and President Trump and this administration have shown in the almost 10 months they've been in office, they believe that the president...
has vastly more power to defy Congress's will to block spending, to block programs approved by Congress, to essentially step on that Article I authority and really scramble the fundamental idea of separation of powers that, again, has governed this country for quite a long time.
It's a very good question.
I think it speaks to the degree to which the Republican Party today is so controlled by one man, the President of the United States right now, Donald Trump.