WATCH: Leading House Democrat promises to protect 'Deep State'

Speaking to Congress on Thursday, Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said members of the GOP want to "eliminate what they call the Deep State."

"The deep state is a cadre of professionals dedicated to honoring the Constitution, the laws of this country and carrying out the policies of the Congress and the president," Hoyer said. 



Writing for Human Events, David Krayden defines the Deep State as "a nebulous formation of entitled bureaucrats who work to undermine freedom and democratic rule by establishing their hegemony over elected officials and electoral outcomes."

For years, Democrats and establishment media denied that a Deep State existed and lampooned the idea as a far right conspiracy theory. In March of 2017, Rolling Stone published an article titled, "Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" which worked to marginalize any claims that a cadre was working in tandem behind the scenes.

The denial energy in media continued with pieces such as Newsweek's 2017 article "Deep State: How a Conspiracy Theory Went From Political Fringe to Mainstream" and "The Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive," written in 2019 for the Daily Beast.

Former President Donald Trump would often criticize the Deep State for their efforts to stifle the change and policies he wanted to implement. Trump would also cite the same clandestine group as the ones working to push the Russia hoax.

Then a shift started happening around 2020 and afterward. Vox wrote in 2020 "The “deep state” is real. But it’s not what Trump thinks it is." Their point of view was much like Hoyer's, that the group existed but was a net good for the country. Similar pieces followed such as Business Insider's "What the American 'deep state' actually is, and why Trump gets it wrong" and "Trump Is Right About the Deep State. Thank God!" from Slate.

"That's what his supporters are suggesting now, and they're suggesting not only that, but they're going to put people in place who want to follow their political edicts, legal or not," Hoyer said of Republican and Trump supporter desire to remove this unelected cadre of power brokers from deciding public policy.

Hoyer, a representative from Maryland, had said in May that the US was at war with Russia as he relished a deep advocacy for the US's support for Ukraine.