NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE D avid Leonhardt would like us all to meet the “new breed of Republicans,” who, in a break with the Reaganite tradition, are apparently “against inequality,” “more skeptical of the free market and more comfortable using government power to regulate the economy than the party has traditionally been.” For my part, I’d like that new breed to spend a couple of hours drinking beers aboard Senator Joe Manchin’s yacht.

I do not expect to convince Senator J. D. Vance that he is wrong about executive pay, or to persuade Senator Marco Rubio that he should not desire the “reinvigoration of collective bargaining,” or to impress upon Oren Cass that capitalism is, in fact, working just fine. But, as a realist, I do think that these figures ought to think a little harder about the real world. In his paean, Leonhardt insists that the members of this “new” group are the real deal: They are not “disaffected right-wingers who have become moderates without admitting it”; they “really are conservative.” This being so, they will presumably be able to stop for a moment and ask themselves whether their desire to grow the size of the government in the exquisitely tailored fashion they recommend can possibly be compatible with their broad-based hostility toward the federal bureaucracy.

Last week, Vance asked whether power in the United States lay within the “permanent unelected bureaucracy” or within the people, and then proposed that the federal indictment of Donald Trump suggested that, instead of “a real republican form of government, we have an oligarchy controlled by the deep state.” Last year, Rubio was among a bunch of Republican senators who “showed openness” to a Trump-era plan to remove any civil servant who displeases the president “and told Axios they think more needs to be done to hold career officials and federal agencies accountable.” Cass, meanwhile, has been honest about the threat that the vanguard of the American Left poses to his project when, as seems inevitable, it “co‐opts bipartisan action on national priorities for unpopular progressive ends.” Is this really the moment at which to further empower Washington, D.C.? I would argue that it is not.

When will that moment come? Never, that’s when. The problem with American industrial policy is not that it is built atop the wrong set of ideas; it is that, outside of a tiny handful of circumstances, most of them related to defense, industrial policies achieve what they are supposed to achieve. The same is true of the bureaucracy, which is not a sprawling, self-serving, anti-democratic mess because its architects just happen to have hired the wrong people, but because a sprawling, self-serving, anti-democratic mess is what all bureaucracies eventually become.

For political progressives, there is little risk in investing yet more power in the national government. On the contrary: For progressives, doing so usually allows them to win twice, first when they pass the expansive policies they covet, and again, via the magic of inertia, when, irrespective of those policies’ efficacy or eventual popularity, the people who rely upon them to make a living move heaven and earth to keep them around. For political conservatives, however, the risks are immense. What, I must ask, have we seen in American politics during the last few years that suggests that it would be a good idea to hand new powers over to the president and the agencies that he nominally oversees? Already, the laws on the books are scoured for loopholes, ambiguities, and sources of the plausible deniability that can be exploited by the White House in defiance of the legislature’s will. In the last two years alone, the president of the United States has issued illegal, extra-statutory orders concerning student loans, evictions from private property, broad-based vaccine mandates, and draconian environmental regulations, and he has been helped along in this endeavor by a bureaucracy that is content to expand its authority by any means necessary. Usually, the president has been halted by the courts. But he will not always be. At some point, the current majority will shift, and the United States will be left in the hands of figures such as Justice Elena Kagan, who, just last year, justified the EPA’s preposterous attempt to rewrite federal law by proposing that “Members of Congress often don’t know enough—and know they don’t know enough—to regulate sensibly on an issue.”

This is no mere hypothesis. Having acquiesced to the wishes of his party and signed off on a bill of which he’d been highly suspicious for a long time, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has spent the last few months railing against the White House and the bureaucratic class for having taken his handiwork and twisted it into a substantially novel form. “Specifically,” Manchin wrote recently, “they are ignoring the law’s intent to support and expand fossil energy and are redefining ‘domestic energy’ to increase clean-energy spending to potentially deficit-breaking levels.” The upshot? “The administration is attempting at every turn to implement the bill it wanted, not the bill Congress actually passed.”

Manchin’s conclusion is that Biden needs to “rein in this extremism.” But this is like asking Jack the Ripper if he’d mind helping the police with their inquiries. Biden cannot “rein in this extremism,” because he endorses and instigates it himself. His presidency, like the Democratic presidency previous to his, and the next Democratic presidency that will come after his, views the mandarins of Washington, D.C., as its allies in the fight against Article I. In this way of working, American law is not a source of narrowly tailored authority but an enormous, carbuncle-laden database of words that can be thrown up into the air and reassembled in any shape possible. An antiquated bill here, an emergency measure there, a now-contextless patch-job in the corner — taken together they can be cut and pasted into a line and deployed to justify whatever temporary political obsession has been deemed too important for the blessings of the Constitution this week. For self-professed conservatives to agree to add even a semicolon to this cornucopia would be stupid indeed. For self-professed conservatives to be sketching out a new set of scaffolding for the edifice suggests not that we are about to see a “new” breed of the species but that we may be veering toward its extinction.