Search Results for: administrative state
February 26, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Last week, in a speech to CPAC, Steve Bannon declared that the Trump administration is battling for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” CNN’s coverage of the speech appeared under the following headline: “Steve Bannon outlines his plan to ‘deconstruct’ Washington.” The Washington Post’s headline (in the paper edition) was similar. It mentioned “deconstruction” but not that which is to be deconstructed — the administrative state. In its story, CNN
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October 9, 2015 — John Hinderaker
One of the Obama administration’s many instances of administrative overreach was the EPA’s “Clean Water rule,” which expanded the definition of “waters of the United States” as used in the Clean Water Act. Some say that the definition is so expansive as to give the federal agency jurisdiction over your back yard. Eighteen states sued to enjoin enforcement of the EPA’s rule, and today, a three-judge panel of the 6th
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June 24, 2015 — Scott Johnson
We have written a lot about the administrative state and administrative law on Power Line over the past few years. Reviewing Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? for National Review last year, I summarized just about everything I have learned about the administrative state. The review was published under the apt heading “A new old regime.” Drawing on his personal experience and observation, a reader writes to comment: As a
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June 9, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Now this is very interesting: Federal Judge Rules SEC’s In-House Judge’s Appointment “Likely Unconstitutional” A federal judge ruled Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of an in-house judge to preside over an insider-trading case was “likely unconstitutional,” a potential blow to the agency’s controversial use of its internal tribunal. The decision possibly creates a serious headache for the SEC, which is increasingly using its five administrative-law judges to
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May 19, 2015 — Steven Hayward
The whole point of a limited government republic with the separation of powers and other constitutional safeguards is to keep government as a neutral force between factions and interests. (See: Madison, Federalist #10. Rinse and repeat.) But today’s administrative state—the increasingly independent fourth branch of government—has transformed government into its own special interest faction, lobbying itself on behalf of itself—increasingly in partisan ways. Case in point is a front page
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May 11, 2015 — Steven Hayward
The key fact of contemporary bureaucracy is this: the problem of bureaucracy today is less its centralizing tendencies in Washington than it is the culture of bureaucracy that now runs fully from top to bottom at all levels of government. It’s bureaucratic turtles all the way down, if you know that old apocryphal story. It may actually be worse at the local level than in Washington DC these days, such
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May 8, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Bureaucracy has been the bane of both rulers and the ruled since the time of the Pharaoh, if not before. Yet the sense that bureaucratic rule is getting worse is pervasive, even among some liberals who usually defend government against conservative criticism. The late George McGovern, the very liberal 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, made headlines back in the 1990s after his attempt at becoming an entrepreneur in a simple industry—a
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May 7, 2015 — Steven Hayward
One of our lefty commenters yesterday lodged an objection to my post on “Liberal Conformity and Times Square” that Congress should just pass a simple fix to the 1965 Highway Beautification Act to exempt Times Square from the obvious silliness of applying the statute to that unique location. Problem solved? Not even close. Because if Congress were asked to step in whenever a bureaucrat did something stupid, they’d hardly have
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May 7, 2015 — Steven Hayward
When I teach legal and constitutional history, one of the first things you ponder is the common law maxim, “Nemo judex in parte sua”— “No man shall be a judge in his own case.” The common sense logic of this hardly needs explaining—except to modern American liberals. The Wall Street Journal has an important story on the front page today that shows how far we’ve gotten from sound legal philosophy,
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September 15, 2014 — Scott Johnson
You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. Administrative law is unrecognized by the Constitution, but, according to Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger, it “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans.” He observes that “administrative law has avoided much rancor because its burdens have been felt mostly by corporations.” This is where you come in: “Increasingly, however, administrative law has
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May 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds and Todd Zywicki have written most recently about the Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point. Operation Choke Point is vaguely described as a Department of Justice initiative to starve disfavored businesses of financial services, but there is no official account of the program; it is shrouded in secrecy, to borrow Professor Zywicki’s description. Glenn refers to the apparent targeting of the (legal) porn industry by Operation Choke Point.
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May 7, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Paul has been writing about the nomination of David Barron to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (here and here). I’ve been writing about the questionable status of the administrative state in light of the separation of powers under the Constitution. To the extent of my capacity to understand, Publius has been my guide and authority. Barron stands at the intersection of Paul’s and my interests.
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May 6, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Scott’s mention below of the teachings of Publius in The Federalist about how our modern administrative state tramples all over the separation of powers has seldom been explained better in recent times than in this classic paragraph below from Boston University law professor Gary Lawson, in his 1994 Harvard Law Review article “The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State.” Savor this with a nice snifter of whiskey: The [Federal Trade]
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May 6, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Numbers 47-51 of the Federalist Papers address the separation of powers. They lie at the center of the collected papers and they are important. Taken together, however, they are difficult; they present a challenge to our understanding. Bill Kristol contributed a superb essay on these particular numbers to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding, edited by Charles Kesler. I recommend it, but those numbers make good
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January 13, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Studying administrative law in law school, I don’t think we read anything that raised questions about the legitimacy of the agencies giving rise to to it. We took it as a given and picked up the story with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946. We should have taken a look at the question of legitimacy in constitutional law, and probably did, though the standard New Deal account
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March 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (and may she remain forever a former Speaker) took a lot of ridicule during the debate over the passage of Obamacare when she said that we’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. I thought the critics had this all wrong. It was, in fact, the most intelligent thing she ever said, albeit unintentionally. What counts is, as Machiavelli put it,
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June 22, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So yesterday I teed off on Nancy Pelosi’s ridiculous explanation for her 2010 remark about Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” She was far from the only liberal who said this, recognizing the inner truth of what it reveals to us about how we are actually governed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats rather
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