I'm willing to bet that none of you woke up this morning wondering what all the fuss was about the Supreme Court's recent "Chevron" rulings. However, for those of you who might have at least given the question a passing thought, here's a good article by John Mauldin and Rod D. Martin, explaining how important these decisions are in restoring to elected officials some powers that had been ceded to unelected, and largely unaccountable, federal bureaucrats. (You should be able to read the article at that link. One of the things I like about Mauldin is that while you're strongly encouraged to subscribe, there's a lot that's not behind a pay wall.)
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron was an early Independence Day gift. Chevron stood for an imperial bureaucracy, neither responsible to the people nor accountable to anyone, a priesthood of experts pursuing what Thomas Sowell called “the vision of the anointed,” interpreting, adjudicating, and above all, making the laws we must live by, however they saw fit.
Last week, in their Loper and Jarkesy rulings, the Court overturned that half-century travesty, partly upending the statist technocratic order and, at least to a degree, replacing it with the Constitutional vision of the Founders.
Take the Environmental Protection Agency as one example. The EPA, like countless other agencies, concentrates the powers of all three branches of government in its agency administrator, the de facto dictator. The agency makes law, and its lawmakers work for the administrator. The agency enforces the laws that it makes, and those enforcers also work for the administrator. Worse still, the agency employs a small army of Administrative Law Judges, or ALJs, whom it may haul you in front of whenever it chooses. They work for the administrator too.
All of this is a grossly unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. It eliminates virtually all checks and balances. And the Chevron Court acknowledged that, to a degree: It said that by 1984, things had been done this way so long that it would just be too disruptive to change things.
In short, Chevron established constitutionality by longevity. You can apply that logic to Plessy v. Ferguson which said in 1896 that segregation was legal within limits and tell me whether you think it’s a good idea.
Under Chevron an agency could sue you in front of its own judges, over its own made-up rules, enforced by its own bureaucrats, and you had no right to an appeal. You didn’t even get a jury of your peers.
At every step of the process, Chevron replaced “government by the people” with that priesthood of experts, those who must simply be trusted to be benevolent, all-knowing, and true.
It’s worse. Increasingly, agency regulations are “strict liability,” which means that your intent doesn’t matter. By this standard, an accidental killing becomes murder. And speaking of murder, agencies issue not just civil but their own criminal laws, by some estimates as many as 300,000 separate agency-made offenses, all adjudicated solely by their own ALJs with no juries and no possibility of appeal.
These out-of-context quotes are just a taste; if they intrigue you, you might enjoy the whole article.
