The Brazil Effect

     Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame co-wrote and directed a cult film in 1985 called Brazil. It was a commentary on living in an over-bureaucratized society created by a totalitarian government. Several times in recent years I have been reminded of that movie's final scene, when the protagonist is walking the street in a whirlwind of papers that attach themselves to him until he is completely overcome under a mountain of paper and is forced to the pavement. It was a rather pithy commentary on the inescapable smothering that results from bureaucracy.
     Almost a quarter century before the election of Barack Obama, Mr. Gilliam accurately illustrated what could easily have been the crushing bureaucracy imposed by his administration. Mr. Obama's health care law alone has generated over a hundred thousand pages of regulations on an industry which for decades has been the envy of the world, and in a few years will be worthy of its pity and a source of shame for Americans. But the massive, unthinkable amount of regulations generated by ObamaCare is an all to common thread that weaves its way through this administration's policies.
     Hundreds of thousands of regulations have been churned out by a White House with teams of policy wonks and lawyers whose job it is to write law masquerading as regulations that are imposed by Executive Branch agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, The Food and Drug Administration, The Department of Health and Human Services, and many others.This mountain of regulations that has reached its nasty tentacles into every aspect of the federal government, makes it almost irrelevant if the Republicants gain a majority in the Senate and hold their majority in the House or not. Barack Obama said he wanted to fundamentally transform America, and this he has done, turning this representative republic, where the people's representatives in congress make law, into a bureaucratic authoritarian socialist society with rules imposed upon it by an out of control Executive.
     The modacans in the Republicant party will sell their souls to the devil to gain the majority in both chambers of congress, only to continue to allow the Executive Branch of government to usurp their constitutionally legitimate authority for law making. The Obama administration, for sure, has been the most lawless, corrupt, and expansive in the history of this nation. But it is a much easier task to transform a self-ruling federalist system into a bureaucratic centralized state when there is no opposition party to speak of roaming the halls of government. And as the Republicant party continues to delude itself that controlling the ever shrinking influence of congress is worthy of leaving their principles abandon in the desert of politics, the rest of us are like the guy in the movie, being suffocated under an ever growing mountain of bureaucracy.