A Cudgel Made From The Alphabet

Regular readers will recall the travails of Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the election-integrity group True The Vote, and the multiple harassments she suffered from the various alphabet agencies as her organization became effective. It was a significant display of the use of the "alphabet agencies" to press a person, and an organization the Obamunist Regime regards as antipathetic to its aims. Fortunately, Engelbrecht and True The Vote withstood the pressure successfully, even managing to bring the tactics under the light of public scrutiny in a Congressional hearing. Not everyone who defies the Regime is that fortunate.

And now, courtesy of Mike Hendrix, we may be about to witness a "micro-regime's" use of the very same mechanisms of oppression:

A family in New Jersey has learned it must follow the Common Core curriculum even though the parents have elected to home-school their child.

According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, Margaret Dolanthe, superintendent of Westfield Public School District, sent the family the district’s home-school policy which “required them to submit a letter of intent [to home-school] and an outline of their curriculum which must follow New Jersey Common Core content standards.”

HSLDA senior counsel Scott Woodruff responded on behalf of the family, arguing the state’s home-schooling laws say no such thing.

Dolanthe consequently dropped demands the family follow the policy but did inform the family their curriculum should still be “guided by the New Jersey Common Core State Standards.”

HSLDA’s Woodruff responded by explaining that home-school families have “no duty to follow or be guided by Common Core.”

[Emphasis added by FWP.]

Please ponder the emphasized sentence. "Should," one of my very favorite words, has ominous implications in this context. Its appearance appends an "or else" to the end of Dolanthe's statement. The consequences would most likely be supplied by New Jersey's Child Protective Services department. As Mike notes:

They better brace themselves for repeated no-knock visits from the Child Protective Services SWAT team over the next several years, too. After all, in the United Soviet Socialist States of Amerika, it takes a village, you know.

Unfortunately, such a sequel seems rather more likely than not.

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The regulatory bureaucracies and the IRS have demonstrated by their behavior that they are bound by no law whatsoever, including the Constitution of the United States. They write "regulations" with the force of law, that no statute empowers them to write. They impose penalties -- often quite substantial ones -- on "violators" without a judicial process of any sort. When those they target manage to call them to account in an open court and obtain legal redress, nothing is ever done to the overreaching agency or any of its myrmidons. Most frightening of all, at this point the agencies that have SWAT-like armament and men tasked to use it probably outnumber those that don't.

The very worst of them, of course, are those that, in collusion with the anti-Constitutional "family courts," intrude mercilessly into the affairs of law-abiding families, often separating parents from their children on the flimsiest imaginable rationale. Indeed, it's been said with some justice that upon receiving the first hint that a Child Protective Services bureaucrat has taken notice of his family, the sole responsible course for a parent to follow is to "haul stakes" and vanish, before the minions of the State can arrive to seize his children. Horror stories that substantiate that bit of advice are many; Stephen Baskerville presents a goodly number of them in his landmark book Taken Into Custody.

Yet all the alphabet agencies are complicit in the destruction of Americans' Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They've succeeded in placing themselves above all law and restraint because the political elite wants it that way. It provides legislators with something to campaign on: their provision of "constituent services."

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There are approximately half a million elective positions in the United States at this time, from the federal level all the way down to the school and library boards. Every politician who contends for an elective position wants above all else someone or something he can use as his target: an incompetent or a villain he can position himself against. This is because nearly all politicians would prefer not to have to run on their records; that would invite far too much scrutiny for most of them to bear. They'd rather campaign against some vilifiable enemy, and a faceless bureaucracy that can be castigated for its misdeeds, with promises of "reform" to come, is the ideal variety.

"Constituent service" is an integral element in this strategy. Consider a Congressman to whom some constituent appeals for help with something impeded by a regulatory bureaucracy. If the Congressman can "assist" the constituent past his difficulty -- perhaps by promising to support the agency's quest for expanded funding, or perhaps by threatening the relevant bureaucrats with a federal investigation aimed at them personally -- he can create a loyalist, a potential campaign donor, and possibly an activist who will help him rally others to his side. Such a loyalist is likely to be much more strongly motivated to support the Congressman than are any of his detractors to unseat him. It's basic "Public Choice" economics at work, with the "organizer" being the politician himself.

Add to the above the likelihood that the politician will "triage" such applicants for his assistance, preferring to smile first, if not exclusively, upon the well-heeled and well-connected.

The nation suffers the aggregate consequences. They are inseparable from the existence of the faceless bureaucracy with de facto unbounded powers. But of course, no politician would ever admit to the dynamic before an open microphone. That would give the game away -- and the game is a great part of the reason for the perennial 90%-plus incumbency perpetuation rate in these United States.

If there's a solution short of massive armed insurrection, I can't think what it might be. Nor is even a successful revolution guaranteed to improve matters. Quoth Richard Tawney: "Revolutions, as long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their color from the regime they overthrow."

I hope to return to this.