Supreme Court Hears Cases That Could Cut Federal Bureaucracy Off at the Knees
The U.S. Supreme Court stands poised to cripple unelected tyrants and help return government to the sovereign people.
Last week, SCOTUS began hearing arguments in two cases that, according to the Washington Examiner, many observers “expect will be used to overturn” an insidious legal doctrine called “Chevron deference,” which has allowed federal bureaucrats to arbitrarily expand their own authority for the last 40 years.
That doctrine has contributed to the metastatic growth of an evil with many names.
Some call it the “deep state.”
At a rally with former President Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Tuesday, erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy gave it a slightly different name and described it as hostile to the people it ostensibly serves.
“We are in the middle of a war in this country,” Ramaswamy said. It is a war, he explained, “between the permanent state and the everyday citizen.”
BREAKING: Vivek Ramaswamy is on FIRE as Donald Trump welcomes him to the stage in New Hampshire in his first appearance after endorsing President Trump:
“We need a Commander-in-Chief who will lead us to victory in this war.”
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/fUeeBSP8Do
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 17, 2024
In June, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri gave that evil yet another name and urged Congress to destroy it once and for all.
“It’s called the administrative state,” Schmitt said on the Senate floor. “And it falls on each one of us here in the Article I branch, in this time and place, to fundamentally dismantle it.”
In a Wednesday post on X, Schmitt cited the SCOTUS cases as the context for his previous comments.
“Chevron deference is a big reason why the Admin State has gotten so big & so powerful. It’s also antithetical to the Founder’s design that prioritized accountability & diffusing power,” Schmitt wrote.
Today #SCOTUS heard arguments in a case that could overturn Chevron.
Chevron deference is a big reason why the Admin State has gotten so big & so powerful
It’s also antithetical to the Founder’s design that prioritized accountability & diffusing power pic.twitter.com/wNfqmcAWuN
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) January 17, 2024
Oddly enough, the legal challenges that could help rein in the deep/permanent/administrative state involve an otherwise peaceful pastime: fishing.
SCOTUS heard arguments in two cases: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. Both cases involve the unauthorized expansion of federal regulatory power over fishermen.
In 1976, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), which required the secretary of commerce to regulate marine fisheries so as to guard against overfishing.
The secretary delegated details to the National Marine Fisheries Service. To gather conservation- and management-related data, the NFMS then placed agency observers on half of all herring fishing boats.
At first, the NFMS itself paid those observers’ salaries. In 2018, however, the agency responded to budgetary constraints by requiring the fishing industry to pay for the monitors.
That caused a substantial problem. After all, the original MSA did not expressly authorize government regulators to charge fishing companies for the cost of monitors. But the regulators did it anyway. And they believed they had sound precedent for doing so.
In the 1984 case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, SCOTUS issued a ruling that has emboldened regulators ever since.
That case involved the question of how much discretion federal regulators enjoyed when Congress failed to specify certain legal details.
“If … the court determines Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation,” then-Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the opinion of the court.
“Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”
Thus, SCOTUS called into existence the doctrine of judicial deference to regulators’ interpretations of their own authority.
This hideous doctrine must go, and the sooner the better.
For one thing, in this specific instance, regulators have forced fishing companies to pay for government monitors who have no relevant experience and thus have displayed comic ineptitude on voyages.
“The real-world consequences of Chevron deference here are akin to forcing fisherman to pay, feed, and board Agency observers whose competence for seafaring enterprises of any kind would frequently make the Keystone Cops blush,” the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association wrote in an amicus brief.
Furthermore, in a broader sense, Chevron deference violates every known principle of justice by stacking the deck in favor of the federal government.
“The effects of Chevron deference cannot be overstated because deference often dictates outcome. And that outcome is whatever the unelected bureaucrats of the more than 430 federal agencies and other regulatory agencies say it is — so long as they sound reasonable,” Margot Cleveland of The Federalist wrote last week.
“It is difficult to imagine anything that could be more consequential to the deconstructing of the administrative state than overturning Chevron,” she added.
Chevron deference, of course, has a predictable coterie of defenders.
For instance, a group of Democratic senators filed their own amicus brief in support of regulators. That group included Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.
“Chevron ensures that unelected courts respect career experts who report to politically accountable agency heads as agencies implement and refine Congress’s broad policy objectives,” the disingenuous brief read.
Note the deference to “career experts” over “unelected courts” — as if anyone elected the “experts.”
Note too the assumption that Congress, in enacting a law, must have had “broad policy objectives” rather than specific purposes.
In a series of X posts on Thursday, Hirono blended decades-old leftist claptrap with fear-mongering over the modern establishment’s ultimate bugbear.
First, she resorted to 20th-century Democratic Party rhetoric about “big businesses and billionaires” — as if those organizations and individuals did not already control both the party and the federal government.
“Eliminating Chevron would prevent the government from fulfilling its most basic functions and allow big businesses and billionaires to further stack the deck in their favor — at the expense of working Americans and small businesses,” she wrote.
Trump, of course, came in for his share of purported blame.
“Justice [Neil] Gorsuch and other Trump-appointee judges have been open about their intent to get rid of the Chevron doctrine. Overturning Chevron would ultimately impact the entire regulatory ecosystem,” Hirono wrote in a follow-up post.
Justice Gorsuch and other Trump-appointee judges have been open about their intent to get rid of the Chevron doctrine.
Overturning Chevron would ultimately impact the entire regulatory ecosystem.
— Senator Mazie Hirono (@maziehirono) January 18, 2024
Hirono and others defend Chevron, of course, because they believe in unfettered state power far removed from the sovereign people. Nonetheless, it might surprise them to learn that the administrative state has deeply insidious roots.
In 1850, for instance, Congress created a special class of officials called “commissioners” to help retrieve runaway slaves.
Those commissioners received $10 in cases where they ruled in favor of the slaveholding claimant. When they allowed the captured fugitive to go free, the commissioners received only $5.
Talk about stacking the deck.
Of course, Congress’ own corruption also contributed to the growth of the administrative state after the Civil War.
In 1871, diplomat Charles Francis Adams argued for the creation of a “tribunal” to regulate the railroads. He cited legislatures’ notorious dishonesty as justification.
“But it will be said, Who will guard the virtue of the tribunal? Why should the corporations not deal with them as with the legislatures? They may do so, but somewhere and at some point, put on all the checks and balances that human ingenuity can devise, we must come back and rely on human honesty at last,” Adams wrote.
By the early 20th century, the idea of government by a small class of specialists had become conventional wisdom.
In 1910, for instance, former President Theodore Roosevelt called for an “expert tariff commission.” Three years later, Congress delegated control of the nation’s money supply to the newly created Federal Reserve.
In short, the process of wresting sovereignty from the people has unfolded over many decades.
While their minions in Congress prattle on about protecting the people from big business, authoritarian bureaucrats enrich themselves. Indeed, according to U.S. News & World Report, five of America’s 10 wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Those statistics do not lie. Money has flowed from the hinterlands into the imperial capital. And the beneficiaries of that massive wealth confiscation have guarded their spoils well. That is the administrative state at work.
Now, however, the time has come to dismantle the administrative state and return government to the people.
The Constitution, of course, confers no authority on unelected bureaucrats. Having stolen that authority with the connivance of courts and congresses, they then proceeded to steal the nation’s wealth.
Striking a blow against Chevron deference would constitute an important step toward stopping that thievery.
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