The legislature has largely abdicated its responsibility to be a co-equal branch of government and work on difficult problems. It has receded to working out the details and marginal cases that the other two branches of government decide. This may account for the growth of legislatively-induced civil service, as it focuses on smaller and smaller details and need to feel important. Mission creep is unrelenting. It certainly doesn't help.
The other two branches step in to fill the void and compete with each other. Whichever party isn't getting its way in a particular branch complains that the Executive/Judiciary is too powerful. They stop saying that in the next election. The executive needs to rein in the judiciary! The judiciary needs to rein in the executive! No one seems to talk much about reining in the congress anymore. It has confined itself to trench warfare on the front lines, with predictable costs of all sorts and lack of movement.
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This is exactly what Max Weber said would happen to all democratic/republican governments with an administrative state. All the real power is ceded to the bureaucracy, who are the only ones who have time to do all that work. The politicians need to be giving speeches and raising money. Eventually there’s very little self-governance left because the wealth and power of the state collects in the hand of an unelected professional government class.
That class has interests of its own, which diverge from the general public’s.
Didn't that sort of thing happen with the eunuchs in China too? I haven't read Weber, but I'd guess that's a tendency in any large enough state.
He was writing during the Weimar Republic, so the piece is often read as a warning about the corruption of that state which allowed the rise of the Nazis. But it's a general, and biting, critique of all such states as they bureaucratized.
It's the only near-contemporary work I've written a commentary upon. It's short, if you want to read it.
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2021/04/max-weber-politics-as-vocation.html
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