You Can’t Defend ‘Democracy’ And The Administrative State [The SCOTUS Chevron Deference Case]

Editors’ Note: The administrative (deep) state of the Executive branch is the greatest threat to the individual sovereignty and liberty of all U.S. citizens in our Republic. The Chevron Deference doctrine established by the Supreme Court in 1984 granted the many parts of the executive branch and its departments to be the actual law writers and enforcers of its editing and rewriting of the legislation passed by Congress for four decades. It has been he driver and expander of the regulatory state and the law-fare used and impoverishing many citizens and businesses since the Supreme Court established this liberty-killing doctrine. Thwo companion cases heard by SCOTUS week on January 24th will decide the fate of Chevron Deference. The decision of the Supreme Court Justices coming this June will hopefully restore the intended balance of power our Founders designed over 235 years ago – Congress passes the laws, the Executive branch executes them. This litigation recently heard by the Supreme Court is one of the most important cases ever before the highest court of the land since the beginning of the Republic. Follow closely!

There are few things less ‘democratic’ than empowering a bunch of unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats to make laws.

The government shows up at your business and demands you pay the salaries of the regulators who lord over you. If you refuse, you’ll be ruined. You have little recourse. You’ve never even voted on the policy because no law implementing it exists. Bureaucrats in D.C. cooked up the idea, and a political appointee signed off on it.

That’s what Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case brought by New England fishermen against Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, is all about. It may finally end or weaken Chevron deference, which refers to a 1984 decision that inadvertently empowered the administrative state to take wide-ranging, illiberal powers over American economic life. I mean, the case of the fishermen is basically a modern reenactment of “taxation without representation.”

Yet when the Supreme Court took up oral arguments in Raimondo, the three leftist judges didn’t focus on the constitutionality of Chevron deference, but rather lamented the alleged problems of stripping government experts of their power. Here is how The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus frames the arguments:

But the fundamental question was clear: Who decides? From the liberal point of view: unelected judges or regulators with expertise and accountability? From the conservative vantage point: judges constitutionally empowered to say what the law is or unelected bureaucrats?

It’s difficult to comprehend how any jurist who swore to uphold the Constitution could agree with the “liberal point of view.” Justices are “unelected” by design. It’s not a gotcha. It’s the point. And it is literally their job to “decide” the constitutionality of the laws and their implementation. Failing to do so is an abdication of their duty. Yet the contemporary left treats SCOTUS as if it were some autocratic Star Chamber for doing its job.

Nowhere, on the other hand, does the Constitution say one word about unelected bureaucrats deciding the law. The executive branch, as the name strongly suggests, is tasked with executing laws as written. The right initially cheered Chevron as a way to blunt judicial activism. But the allowances for “reasonable” decision-making when ambiguity exists in the law have been so abused that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency will regulate every puddle and molecule of carbon dioxide.

Then again, the claim that regulators have unassailable “expertise” or real accountability is also a myth.

Moreover, the notion that government regulators are the best and brightest and attain their position through merit is complete bunkum, as anyone who’s paid more than five minutes of attention to the government already knows. This is especially true of political appointees, whose most valued skills are navigating bureaucracies and risk aversion.

Indeed, bureaucrats do not function under a notion of “accountability” that most normal people would recognize. When was the last time an agency cleaned house because its policies had failed? When was the time the administrative state was reined back in any genuine way? How many regulators or appointees are ever fired? If you were as bad at your job as Alejandro Mayorkas, you’d be out of work forever.

That said, even if regulators were blessed with extraordinary work ethic, exceptionally creative minds, and all the best ideas, they would still have zero right to create laws out of whole cloth.

The histrionics over the potential death of Chevron deference is just another example of the left’s abandonment of anything resembling a limiting principle. It’s all consequentialism, all the time. Anything Democrats dislike is an attack on “democracy.” When the court hands the abortion issue, unmentioned anywhere in the Constitution, back to voters, virtually every leftist in the country warns that “democracy” is under attack. When the same court threatens to stop unelected technocrats from doing whatever they like, democracy is again being threatened. It doesn’t even make any sense.

What Chevron deference does is incentivize Congress to write vague laws and presidents to abuse their power. It creates instability, as every administration implements its own preferred interpretation of the law. It threatens to further destroy the separation of powers. It was a huge mistake. And, as opposed to most of the left’s hysterics these days, it’s a real threat to “democracy.”

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.