Before we start, I have the first installment of a new series up over at Glibertarians.  Go read!

Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter has an interesting take on what to do with the FBI – namely, get rid of it.  Excerpt:

Time to defund the feds.

This agency is beyond redemption, so we need to end the Federal Bureau of Investigation for good. We must defund the federal police – a federal police force we probably shouldn’t have in the first place.

Now, we as individuals can do our part by aggressively exercising our rights under the increasingly-optional Constitution to refuse to speak to the FBI without our attorneys present. They hate that. Also, as we have learned, they hate to record interviews, which is super-convenient because, again as we have seen, their post ex facto written reports can be massaged into the finding(s) they want. There was a time when normal Americans were proud to give their assistance to the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. But that was before the FBI chose to become an armed arm of a particular political faction. Choices have consequences. All that goodwill? Flushed. Now, you are frankly nuts to trust the FBI. We know, because we saw what happened to Mike Flynn when he trusted the FBI.

Read the entire article, of course.  Here’s the main thing, though, as I see it:  Where is the constitutional authorization for the FBI?  The agency is a pretty new organization, as Imperial satrapies go, having been founded as an independent service in 1935.  But there doesn’t appear to be a plain constitutional authorization for an Imperial law enforcement arm – in this, even the U.S. Marshal’s service is on dubious ground, despite having been founded during the Presidency of George Washington.  In this case, the 10th Amendment would preclude any such agency existing.

I doubt any such defunding will happen, no matter who controls Congress.  And in any case, you can add the FBI to a long, long list of Imperial agencies and bureaus that have no business existing – Education, Environment, and Energy, just to look at the “E” page in the Imperial dictionary.  But the beast only grows; it never shrinks.  Government growth is a ratchet, not a dial.

The best we can hope for is this:  The next President decapitates the organization.  Fire everyone with the word “Director” anywhere in their title, and maybe down a few more levels after that.  Start anew.  Maybe a nice dose of pour encourager les autres will help straighten things out.