<i>For an unelected panel of judges to come in, above the agencies, and tell them how the president is allowed to enforce laws is a perversion of the constitutional order and separation of powers—and a repudiation of democracy itself.</i><p>It's a curious take. My understanding is that it is curbing the ability of the executive to issue laws (by calling them regulations), ie congress is not allowed constitutionally to delegate its law issuing powers away. So the power for the executive to issue new laws has to be extremely limited. State agencies officials are as unelected as judges. Congress cannot vote that an agency can issue any rule it wants for the environment for instance.<p>I know it is frustrating to have to go through congress to make changes but that's the very definition of democracy, the progressive accumulation of power in the hands of the executive is not.
For those interested in the counter-argument, see: Is Administrative Law Unlawful?[0]<p>"While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society.<p>With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent.<p>With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism."<p>[0] <a href="https://a.co/d/0hwcobEW" rel="nofollow">https://a.co/d/0hwcobEW</a>
Interesting definition of a power grab. Unelected agencies and courts making laws ex nihilo isn't a power grab, but moving power back towards the only directly democratically accountable branch of government and not even the branch which made the decision is.
That's a really weird turn of phrase, because the courts, even the Supreme Court, cannot arbitrarily act on its own. A case must be brought to the court. Even then, congress sets the jurisdiction for these courts. To call this a "power grab" is hyperbole.
Great article. Wow. Now that the courts have so much more law to administer, it might be time to expand the courts to include more judges so that laws can be speedily decided. Let's start with the Supreme Court, who believes it is intellectual enough to decide technical details concerning the safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals over the PhDs and MDs in the FDA, flight safety controls over the senior engineers and PhDs at airplane manufacturers, and atmospheric modeling over the PhDs in Environment and Biology at the EPA. Since the judges require so much more expertise now, let's go ahead and add 15 more of them with a varety of these specialized degrees. Then we can be confident they can truly be neutral when deciding matters of great import between the people and the moneyed interests.
This is an earth shattering redefinition of governance, completely remaking what governance is.<p>(Trump also plans to redo Schedule F, dubbing most appointees as political, and thus capable of being fired at will.)<p>The attempt to normalize & justify a massive rebuilding of our government like this is mind blowing. Shame on the many many many comments pretending like this is ok, like it's fine that we don't let agencies do anything at all, that ever single bit of the law has to be passed by Congress directly, without any delegation whatsoever. Congress does not have that capacity! It's impossible to imagine.<p>The Supreme Court had to throw on a "oh but pretty please don't use this to dismantle <i>everything</i> we have, respect <i>stare decsis</i> — that this is how we've governed in practice forever, through delegation." The new way is something entirely new.<p>These radicals are de-governing this nation, are tearing down the ability to do anything. This is a day of true horrors.
This is an interesting redefinition of the words "power grab". I'm not sure if this is like a mental issue people are having where truth is just become entirely subjective and so they can twist anything to mean anything they want or if this is intentional propaganda to mislead people.<p>The power grab that was done was with Congress abdicating their power into unelected bureaucracies to create and enforce rules with the force of law. What the supreme Court is saying is that Congress cannot abdicate their power into an unelected bureaucracy. Congress can pass laws and the president can have people enforce those laws but those laws cannot be so broad as to say this unelected enforcement agency can literally write new laws in the form of regulations and then enforce them as if they were law without any kind of recourse. That is a fundamental violation of due process to say some agency was empowered with such broad authority and such broad scope that they can literally write any rule that they want and you must follow it.<p>To limit the agencies to actually enforcing the law that Congress passed and requiring that those laws be specific enough that they are not open to broad interpretation and redefinition is the opposite of a power grab. It is the limitation of unelected bureaucrats in their power. If Congress wishes to re-empower them they simply need to pass the laws. Those experts, as they claim in the article, have within their power to suggest new legislation for things they want to implement. Having them just be able to arbitrarily make any new rule that they want under a broad umbrella of you are empowered to protect the environment is akin to a dictatorship.