Speaking of cats and dogs, David makes a key point about Shimkus’ view on bureaucracy is telling and points towards Chris Hayes’ article on the value of bureaucracy in democratic government.
After all, what could be a more absurd example of mindless red tape than a midnight drive to a hospital to obtain…a supervisor’s signature? But the moral of the Comey story specifically, and of the failures of the Bush Administration more broadly, is the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That’s why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.
Bureaucracy in a democracy is primarily bound by the law. We’ve spent the time since World War II building up bureaucratic responsiveness to democratic influences–most notably the Administrative Procedures Act that nearly all, if not all states, have copied.
When bureaucracy ‘doesn’t work’ it’s not generally some inherent flaw in bureaucracy itself, but the rules under which they work designed by Congress to make the bureaucracy responsive to them and the public as a whole. That’s a good thing. It means they are following the law. Efficiency is a goal to certainly make very important, but not efficiency to sacrifice democratic responsiveness.
Two points:
– Conservative partisans seem to have problems with the laws themselves (not just the “bureaucracies” built to support those laws), else the Bush Administration wouldn’t keep trying to define radical reinterpretations of existing law (let alone allegedly ignoring some laws altogether)…
– The Social Security Administration is an example of a “bureaucracy” which is both highly efficient and highly responsive to a need determined by our democracy.