Administrative state
July 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi posted “Take that, Internet censors!” last week to comment for his paid subscribers on Judge Doughty’s ruling in Missouri v. Biden. As we have reported, Judge Doughty’s ruling preliminarily enjoins the federal government’s censorship regime and is on appeal to the Fifth Circuit as of yesterday. Big Brother is not happy. Taibbi has now made his “Take that” post available in video and podcast form with narration by
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July 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In “Walk away, Joe,” I tried to provide legal background on likely next steps in Missouri v. Biden — the most important free speech case to come down the pike since I don’t know when. Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty has entered a preliminary injunction limiting the communications of the federal censorship regime — President Biden and designated officials/agencies — with social media companies. Judge Doughty’s preliminary injunction
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July 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
President Biden is not going to walk away from the extensive censorship regime he has implemented in the executive branch. The censorship was preliminarily enjoined on Independence Day by Chief Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana in Missouri v. Biden. Judge Doughty’s injunction order is posted online here. It is supported by Judge Doughty’s 155-page memorandum here. I commented briefly on the injunction in “Enjoining Mr. Joe”
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July 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of several books including Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014). Steve Hayward mentioned the book earlier this week in “Will the Supreme Court dismantle the administrative state?” Professor Hamburger argues that administrative law is unlawful, unconstitutional, and illegitimate. Drawing on English legal history, he contends that the regime of agency government resurrects the
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July 3, 2023 — John Hinderaker
As I have written more than once, the government we live under is not the one described in the Constitution. The ubiquitous and powerful arm of our government, found nowhere in the Constitution, is the Fourth Branch, the plethora of federal agencies, the administrative state. The administrative state has assumed much of the power that the Constitution assigns to the legislative and executive branches, a development that has progressed now
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June 12, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John wrote yesterday about how the case for the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID is now more firmly locked down than a university president’s brain. Now we come to add a brand new paper, circulating in pre-print form on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) that is devastating about the collateral costs of our COVID policy madness, especially the lockdowns. The paper is titled “How Did the COVID
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May 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Sometime in the middle of our unfolding Iraq agony beginning 20 years ago, the State Department decided it needed to build a new embassy compound in Baghdad at a total cost approaching $1 billion. No one seemed to ask why our mission in Iraq, which we assumed wouldn’t last forever, needed what looked like an outpost for a permanent colonial empire rather than a mere security necessity. What security necessity—both
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April 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Trump doesn’t seem to have the same clear central focus for his agenda and campaign messaging so far, partly because he can’t seem to decide whether to attack Biden and Democrats more than his GOP rivals, despite his clear front-runner status. But one of his good ideas that is front and center is civil service reform, aimed at bringing the administrative state back inside the Constitution. Our permanent government rules
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April 17, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Tucker Carlson has tweeted two brief video clips of his interview with Elon Musk. The clips are a preview of coming attractions. The interview is to be broadcast tonight and tomorrow night. In one of the clips, Musk reveals what he has learned from his perch as the new owner of Twitter: “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at
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April 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Biden administration’s effort to impose electric vehicles on the car-buying public should at least be noted. It is taking place under power delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency by Congress under the regime of administrative law that controls so much of the way we live now. Forgive me for citing my own review “A new old regime.” Politico called on six reporters to celebrate the regulatory diktat intended to
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March 8, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Biden administration is taking a whole-of-government approach to torturing new Twitter under Elon Musk into silence. Those damn Twitter Files have gotten under someone’s skin and the FTC is on the case, demanding that Twitter “identify all journalists” who have had a look. That should get someone’s attention. The FTC demand is part of a broader investigation on which the Wall Street Journal reports here (“The FTC is also
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March 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has now contributed thread number 17 to the Twitter Files series beginning with the tweet below. The thread comes in 50 parts that can be accessed here. 1. TWITTER FILES #17New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists pic.twitter.com/8LuoKY9zzA — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023 Taibbi has separately summarized each of the 17 threads here at his Racket News site. He summarizes the current installment as
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March 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I commented on the oral argument held by the Supreme Court in Biden v. Nebraska in “Giving it away” earlier this week. It’s an important case. The Biden administration should go down in flames in it. Based on the oral argument, I thought Missouri’s alleged standing in the case deriving directly or indirectly from the state’s student loan administrator (MOHELA) is tenuous. If a majority of the Court reaches the
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March 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I subscribe to alerts from services including the Associated Press, the New York Times, Axios, Politico, and Semafor. Every one of them agrees that yesterday’s oral argument in Biden v. Nebraska portended difficulties for President Biden’s $500 billion student loan giveaway. I listened to the oral argument on C-SPAN and have posted it below. I hope they have it right. Biden’s royal decree (via Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona) canceling
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February 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The “administrative state” is an obscure and ungainly phrase, but in recent years the term has burst out into general use, though it is often conflated with another term currently popular—the “deep state.” They are not the same thing, though they do overlap, and “deep state” does enjoy the advantage of being shorter and pithier. What is “the administrative state”? It is a mistake to confuse it with mere bureaucracy,
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February 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Chris Rufo has posted a discourse he titles “Biden nationalizes the DEI bureaucracy” (“How the president’s recent executive order threatens to subvert the principles of liberty and equality,” video below) on President Biden’s long and painful DEI executive order with this introduction: Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal
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February 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The current issue of Imprimis carries an adaptation of John Daniel Davidson’s February 7 Hillsdale College lecture on the Twitter Files. The title of the lecture is “The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat.” Davidson begins with a point I have made several times in my own comments on the Twitter Files: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt
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