The Administrative State – as I’ve said for years, it is the end goal of Progressives and we see too many Republicans (right, Ovide?) supporting other Republicans in moving the Overton Window leftward in achieving it in diminishing the power of the Legislative Branch by the empowerment of the Executive Branch’s agencies. The only way to forestall this is to lessen this “Fourth Branch of Government” which in a lot of ways is acting like a complete government on its own: it makes its own rules, enforces its own rules (legislature), its own law enforcement, has its own administrative courts and judges (judiciary) for fines and jail time, and increasingly, levying its own set of fines AND taxes. And now this (and near the end, lets the BIG cat out of the bag) (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Senate Dem: ‘I fear for the Union’ if Congress limits bureaucratic power
A debate about whether Congress should pass a law that would restrain federal bureaucrats from taking action without clear legal authority provoked one senator to wonder if Congress would be able to handle the extra workload.
Well, isn’t that the ACTUAL problem – that bureaucrats do this BECAUSE Congress is doing a pi**-poor job at writing legislation in the first place? That IF you took the time to do it right in the beginning, with the attitude of “we have ONE job to do and this is it”, just maybe this problem would never have happened in the first place?
“If we litigate and kick back to Congress everything in the middle and the court says now Congress wants to rehear this because we just passed a law that says if you don’t like what the agency has done, kick it back to us — I fear for the Union, based on what I’ve seen since I’ve been here,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Thursday. “Because the regulatory world has become so complex, it just becomes so extraordinarily difficult.”
Hey dudette, if the kitchen is too hot for you, go home. And remember, CONGRESS created this problem by sticking its nose into everything, believing it is the camel and everything else is a tent. This is THE classic case of a busybody going where it shouldn’t have, and now has lot control.
And along the way, has raised the stakes in almost everything. So of COURSE, everything is going to be argued at the Federal level because instead of obeying the letter and spirit of the Constitution, you all have basically Federalized everything in Civil Society – and now you are baffled why people react to what you have created?
Agency power to interpret law has been a growing source of litigation in recent years, sparking lawsuits in cases as diverse as the availability of Obamacare subsidies or Environmental Protection Agency rules that expand its control over the waters of the United States. The regulators go into those lawsuits with the advantage of knowing that prior Supreme Court cases have established a precedent that courts should defer to agencies in interpreting the law.
And this is a huge problem! It is one thing for the Legislative Branch to defer to the Executive Branch (Obamacare’s infamous “the Secretary shall” moving what the legislators should have done and moving their burden to a more than willing Executive Branch to decide things), it is another then the Judiciary to say that it will bow to the Executive Branch as well.
Just do your damned jobs, people! Where is that “jealously guard” your respective roles and Constitutional Powers bit?
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., wants to shift the balance of power by passing a law that would require the courts to interpret the law, rather than the agencies — which would cut against the Chevron ruling in 1984 that established that the courts would yield to agency experts
What a concept! But that’s what we see all over – certainly I have seen it at the local level where “civilian elected politicians” oft defer to “the professionals” on local issues – again, not bothering to note or want their elected mandate to govern.
“[Excessive deference has fundamentally changed how federal agencies regulate and how Congress writes law,” Lankford, who chaired the hearing, wrote in the Washington Examiner last year. “This is a tragic deviation from the constitutional structure of our three branches of government. Instead of simply carrying out the directives of Congress, agencies now look for ambiguities in the law, knowing that courts will defer to their interpretation.”
Hey John, don’t forget that “shall” word, eh – no getting out of your own failures here.
Heitkamp, although she seemed skeptical of undoing the Chevron doctrine, suggested that Congress could help resolve the problem by writing clear laws. “The legislative branch needs to do a better job when we write laws,” she said. “For various reasons we are not always clear in our intent or our expectation.
And then the cat out of the bag:
Maybe it’s because we don’t want to make a decision, and we want to kick the ball and the can down the road, instead of actually doing the job that we were elected to do — which is to resolve difficult issues of public policies.”
But instead of doing the job, they just keep doing the same thing over and over. I guess she like to “be someone instead of doing something” and the pay rather than doing the right thing.
(H/T: Washington Examiner)
