Administrative state
April 11, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend I received an invitation to attend the New Civil Liberties Alliance conference hosted by George Washington University Law School yesterday: “Is administrative law still unlawful?” (Plot spoiler: the answer is “yes.”) Luckily for me, I am in Washington visiting family this week and was able to attend the conference. The conference celebrated the tenth anniversary of the publication of Professor Philip Hamburger’s monumental treatise Is Administrative Law
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April 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014) constitutes a pioneering work of intellectual restoration. Provoked by recent developments in administrative law, I have returned to it this week. Just in time for this concluding post, I heard from Professor Hamburger last night. He wrote: Dear Scott, Thank you so much for your kind discussion of my book! Alas, there is still a long way to go in clearing up the
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April 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful? I thought I would follow up “The case against administrative law” with the interview I conducted with Professor Hamburger back in 2014, after I had reviewed Is Administrative Law Unlawful? for National Review. It may be slightly dated. However, as the song goes, “the fundamental things apply.”
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April 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Every day the news brings word of edicts handed down from on high by rulers whose names we have never heard of or voted for. I mean the heads of the various administrative agencies that control every corner of our lives. Administrative law is not an inherently interesting subject. You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. William F. Buckley, Jr. used to
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March 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal has a feature news story in today’s edition detailing a fact long known about the success Cuban intelligence has enjoyed penetrating American government over the years, in particular their sophisticated and widespread recruitment efforts. “Cuba has ‘the best damn intelligence service in the world’ for cultivating agents, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who led the agency’s Latin America division,” the story notes. There is
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March 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
I am so old, I can remember when “public servants” used to earn less money than they could have expected in the private sector. But those days are long gone. Now, government employees have the rest of us by the throat. Our tax dollars are enriching them, on the average, far beyond what they could earn anywhere else. This is from Stephen Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity: The average cost
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February 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Biden administration has fashioned another program of student debt relief forgiveness. The so-called SAVE plan was promulgated by regulation last year. It takes the load off the fanny of beneficiaries of certain federal college loan programs and puts it right on the back of taxpayers. Politico reports that Biden is emailing 153,000 student loan borrowers that he’s canceling their debt. “I hope this relief gives you a little more
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December 14, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
Ten years ago this month, “climate expert” John Beale, the EPA’s highest-paid employee, was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison. His crime was like something from Ian Fleming on LSD. [You can see Power Line’s coverage of this story from the time starting here.] In 1994, Beale told his EPA bosses he was actually a CIA spy working in London, India and Pakistan when he was actually kicking back
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November 17, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
Back in July, the MidValley Times reported, officials in Reedley, California, discovered an illegal laboratory harboring mice, blood, tissue and bodily fluid samples, along with “thousands of vials that contained unlabeled fluids.” Closer inspection revealed “bacterial and viral agents, including: chlamydia, E. Coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5, and rubella” along with “samples of malaria.” An outfit called Prestige Biotech had had been operating the
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October 7, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo is blazing a wide trail of destruction through critical race theory and wokism these days, but along the way he produced the 10-minute video below making the case that President Nixon was the first significant political figure to grasp the essence of the modern administrative state along with the determination to fight it. Alas, despite some early successes, Nixon’s larger plans were undone by the
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October 6, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
Hillary Clinton recently told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that supporters of Donald Trump were “cult extremists” and “at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.” (See video below.) In its report on the exchange, Fox News recalled Clinton’s statement that Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables. . . They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” If the deplorables wonder
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August 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
In conversation over the weekend with a set of smart folks, someone raised the sensible question: why is no one in the Republican presidential field (except Trump very briefly recently) attacking a government that is forcing us to buy electric cars we don’t want, toilets that have to be flushed twice (to save water!), dishwashers and laundry equipment that don’t clean dishes or clothes very well, expensive light bulbs that
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August 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I didn’t see this coming. Christopher Rufo draws his map for the counterrevolution we need from Richard Nixon. He starts with Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, to which my mentor Jeffrey Hart contributed the line: “Ramsey Clark is a conscientious objector in the war against crime.” Well, Rufo has got me thinking. Rufo advocates his plan in the Summer 2023 City Journal essay “Bring on the counterrevolution” and in his Manhattan
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August 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Andrew McCarthy’s weekly NRO column eludcidates “The ‘Biden brand’ racket.” It is educational and biting. He deserves a Pulitzer Prize for commentary of this quality week after week. The only problem is that it is kept behind NRO’s paywall. Somebody really ought to arrange with NRO to let McCarthy’s columns run free. As the kid says in A Thousand Clowns, “And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky.” What
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July 27, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
You’ve likely never heard of Scottish mathematician John Napier, but his invention of logarithms in 1614 revolutionized the scientific world by making complicated calculations a thing of the past. In a recent essay, Simon Black, the founder of financial/political website Sovereign Man, discussed Napier’s concept of logarithmic decay, which he noted “models many real world phenomena.” According to Black: [S]omething [a society or even one’s bank account] declines very, very
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July 20, 2023 — John Hinderaker
A Kinsley gaffe, of course, is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. So, a footnote to yesterday’s IRS whistleblower hearing: Congressman Kweisi Mfume of Maryland denounces the Republicans’ criticisms of the Department of Justice, the FBI and the IRS. Why? Because it is the job of those agencies to “keep this democracy in check.” That is perhaps, in a single sentence, the clearest statement of the difference between the
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July 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Biden Administration has suffered two setbacks in federal courts this week. Both are significant. The first is the decision released today allowing Microsoft to complete its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the video gaming platform. The Biden Administration, which wants to take us back to 1950s-era antitrust madness, had sought to block the acquisition. The Wall Street Journal reports: Microsoft can close its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a
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