Deroy Murdock’s piece from last week “Hillary’s New Hires Would Go Far Beyond the Supreme Court” is right on target. As he notes, personnel is policy much of the time and especially so when we’re dealing with high positions in the federal bureaucracy and judiciary. A fairly recent book that underscores that point very strongly is Liberty’s Nemesis edited by Dean Reuter and John Yoo (Encounter Books) and my latest Forbes piece is about that extremely important book.

The big point the essayists make is that we have moved away from the Constitution’s framework of divided power and checks and balances and, especially under Obama, into (as the book’s subtitle says) the unchecked expansion of the state.

One method by which overreaching federal bureaucrats accomplish their desires by extra-legal means is to make up new laws to suit them by declaring that their “interpretations” of statutes are binding, even if they haven’t bothered going through the noticed and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. That, for example, is why nearly all of our colleges and universities (excepting only those tiny few that have decided by protect their independence by declining to take any federal money) are now forced to obey the dictates of the Education Department’s hyper-political Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on anything dealing in the slightest with sex. Obama’s OCR has been terrible in expanding its reach and now that they have shown how much zealous officials there can get away with, a Hillary administration would probably be even worse.

Another method is for federal officials to ignore laws they don’t like. The president is supposed to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and that doesn’t mean only the ones that fit in with his political goals. In one of the book’s excellent essays by Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky, we see how the Department of Justice has turned a blind eye to the federal statute that requires states to clean up their voter lists. That law was pronounced “uncongenial” by a DoJ minion because Obama was only interested in expanding voter participation.

Just imagine the outcry if a Republican president stopped enforcing, say the National Labor Relations Act because it is “uncongenial” with the objective of economic expansion.

Anyway, the book makes the frightening case that we’ve reached the tipping point on the concentration of federal power, especially when a large part of that unconstitutional power is used to squelch opposition to it. If we aren’t already past the point of no return, another Clinton presidency would certainly put us there.