Tea at Trianon: Give Bondi and Patel Time to Work

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, May 10, 2025

Give Bondi and Patel Time to Work

From Amuse on X:

Bondi and Patel have not failed the moment, they are precisely meeting it. But the work of tearing down the administrative state is neither glamorous nor immediate. It is, like surgery, meticulous and often hidden from view.
Let us begin with what cannot be denied: results. Bondi has been Attorney General for just 90 days, and under her Department of Justice more than 17,000 prosecutions have been initiated. Patel, only 75 days into his tenure as Director of the FBI, presides over an agency that has made over 18,000 arrests in that same period. These are not small numbers. They reflect a machine still operating, but now being steered, slowly, deliberately, in a different direction.
These figures should already complicate the charge that "nothing is happening." But to appreciate the scale of the work ahead, we must look beyond raw numbers. The deeper mission of this administration is not merely to punish wrongdoers, but to unearth and dismantle the vast, embedded network of institutional rot, often euphemized as the deep state, that has metastasized throughout the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Consider the Civil Rights Division at DOJ, long a stronghold of progressive legal activism. Within 90 days, Bondi and her Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has overseen the departure, either through resignation or separation incentives, of more than half of its lawyers. That alone signals a tectonic shift. But this is not just a personnel change; it is a philosophical redirection. Bondi is asking a question rarely posed in Washington: who among these 10,000 DOJ lawyers is loyal not to the bureaucracy, but to the Constitution? Finding the answer is neither fast nor glamorous. Reading just one resume per lawyer would take five months of full-time effort. And of course, each departure demands a replacement, one who is both ideologically sound and professionally competent. That search cannot be outsourced to headhunters.
Kash Patel, likewise, has inherited an institution riddled with politicization. The FBI under Comey and Wray became synonymous with selective enforcement, leaking, and bureaucratic insubordination. Patel’s response has been swift, though not theatrical. Twenty senior officials have been removed, retired, or reassigned. More profoundly, over 1,500 agents have been constructively terminated, moved from their preferred offices in D.C. to regional field posts, with many choosing to resign. In a bureaucracy of nearly 38,000, this kind of targeted attrition represents meaningful reform. And yet, it is the quiet work of trench warfare, not the pyrotechnics some seem to expect.
Why does it feel slow? Because the swamp cannot be drained in a day. Government, by design, resists rapid change. Civil service protections, union contracts, activist judges, and congressional oversight all conspire to preserve inertia. Add to this the need to build trust within the ranks, to install leaders who will not merely obey orders but champion a renewed mission, and one begins to see the enormity of the task. Firing is easy; replacing with the right people is not. (Read more.)