Deep Dive: How the Deep State Subverts the Constitution, and How to Beat It

The Deep State is the 90-year one-party regime FDR created to rule us regardless of the outcome of elections. We can change that, right now.

by Rod D. Martin
March 28, 2025

There’s a reason so many policies never seem to change — no matter who wins an election.

Presidents come and go. Congress changes hands. Yet the machinery of government grinds on, untouched, unbothered, and largely unaccountable. Federal agencies issue thousands of new rules every year — governing everything from how your business operates (or if it can operate) to what kind of appliances you’re allowed buy — most of them without a single vote from Congress or a word of approval from the President you elected.

The American Founders did not design a technocracy. They designed a republic. They built a government of laws, not of experts — a system rooted in consent, structured by separated powers, and accountable at every turn to the people who must live under it.

Democrats demand consent for everything, even to enter their segregated “safe spaces”. But when it comes to government, they don’t want your consent. Nor do they need it.

The Founders did not anticipate a Department of Education. Or an EPA. Or an “independent” SEC. They would not have tolerated a regime in which anonymous regulators, immune from removal, write, enforce, and adjudicate rules that carry the force of law. And they certainly never imagined a judiciary that would defer to those same agencies on the meaning of the laws it was entrusted to interpret.

Yet that is the system we live under now, a system of siloed subject-matter dictatorships.

We call it a “government,” but in practice, it is something else: a vast, unelected administrative state — what some have rightly called a fourth branch of government, or even an aristocracy (which is exactly what it is) — exercising legislative, executive, and judicial powers simultaneously, and without the consent (or even the awareness) of the governed.

This transformation was not accidental. Nor was it driven by necessity (though FDR claimed that). It was and remains a deliberate effort to displace representative government with bureaucratic control, which is to say, control by Democrats. FDR knew the army of bureaucrats he created would obey him. The idea wasn’t to reduce his own power, or Truman’s or Obama’s. It was to hedge against future election losses: to disempower Eisenhower, and Nixon, and Ford, and Reagan, and Bush, and Bush, and Trump. Definitely Trump.

There’s a reason that this January 42% of federal employees told pollsters they would “resist” the elected President. There’s a reason Trump has drawn more “nationwide injunctions” than all other Presidents combined. The permanent government — what we call the Deep State — never changes. It is of Democrats, by Democrats, and for Democrats.

That’s what they mean by “Our Democracy”. Never forget it. And the last thing they want is for elections to actually matter.

This is the reason that elections seem to change very little (at least when Republicans win), that Congress avoids responsibility, and that the President often appears irrelevant to the very branch he supposedly leads. The system really is rigged. FDR executed a stealth coup d'é·tat, like Caesar Augustus keeping the forms of the Republic but not the substance.

But elections have to matter. If we are serious about restoring constitutional government, we must confront the structure that replaced it. That begins with understanding the magnitude of the problem.

This Deep Dive examines how the administrative state arose, how it functions, and why it poses an existential threat to self-government and liberty. It traces the legal and political decisions that enabled it, the doctrines that protect it, and the structural reforms needed to dismantle it.

1. The Founders’ Vision and the Rise of the Deep State
2. The Post-War Bureaucratic Explosion
3. The Judiciary's Abdication and the Long Overdue Death of Chevron
4. Nationwide Injunctions and the Rise of the Black Robe Bureaucracy
5. Remedies: Congress, the Court, and Civil Disobedience

It is an action plan. And a reckoning.

We begin with the Founders’ design, and how far we’ve strayed from it.