Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic

by Jon D. Michaels

Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy—but not the goods and services the welfare state provides—Americans have demanded that government be made to run like a business. Hence today’s privatization revolution.But as Jon D. Michaels shows, separating the state from its public servants, practices, and institutions does violence to our Constitution, and threatens the health and stability of the Republic. Constitutional Coup puts forward a legal theory that explains the modern welfare state as a worthy successor to the framers’ three-branch government.What legitimates the welfare state is its recommitment to a rivalrous system of separation of powers, in which political agency heads, career civil servants, and the public writ large reprise and restage the same battles long fought among Congress, the president, and the courts. Privatization now proclaims itself as another worthy successor, this time to an administrative state that Americans have grown weary of. Yet it is a constitutional usurper. Privatization dismantles those commitments to separating and checking state power by sidelining rivalrous civil servants and public participants.Constitutional Coup cements the constitutionality of the administrative state, recognizing civil servants and public participants as necessary—rather than disposable—components. Casting privatization as an existential constitutional threat, it underscores how the fusion of politics and profits commercializes government—and consolidates state power in ways both the framers and administrative lawyers endeavored to disaggregate. It urges—and sketches the outlines of—a twenty-first-century bureaucratic renaissance.

312 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 23, 2017

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michaels argues that the push to privatize government by contracting out policy-making positions and stripping civil servants of their job security has undermined the separation of powers between agency heads, career bureaucrats, and citizens that was created through the implementation of the Administrative Procedures Act in the last half of the 20th Century. This imbalance needs to be corrected by reinvigorating the civil service and by improving opportunities for a greater number of citizen groups from across the spectrum to be able to participate in the administrative rule-making process.