by BRIAN ALMON
Online leftists are freaking out in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Chevron Deference. Why? Because the administrative state has been the Trojan Horse for inserting progressivism into our Republic for the better part of the last century.
Laurence Tribe, a far-left ideologue masquerading as a legal expert on TV, had a typical reaction:
A New York Times and CNN contributor said the ruling increases the power of the executive branch:
In truth, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo actually decreased the power of the executive, power that has been gradually delegated by Congress over the past century. An anonymous account on Twitter explained it succinctly:
Ever since the end of World War II, there has been a sense that running the country is too important a task to be left up to whomever happens to win an election. Politicians are held captive to ideology, to electoral concerns, to promises made to their voters, which means they can’t simply do what is clearly and obviously right. Rather than allowing such people to make the important decisions, it would be better (so the thinking goes) to delegate that authority to objective experts.
One of the biggest postwar conceits was that ideology inevitably leads to conflict, but it is possible to strip away ideology and come up with ideas that work for everybody. Science and technology were marching inexorably toward a future where every human problem could be solved without resorting to ideological concerns. This became the central motivating idea of the administrative state, the army of unelected bureaucrats who would engage in the day-to-day running of the country while Congress and the president acted mostly as figureheads.
Many laws passed as part of the New Deal were deliberately left vague, allowing the myriad independent agencies that were being created to interpret them as they saw fit. President Franklin Roosevelt himself worried that the power being transferred to these agencies “…threatens to develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”
In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act, intending to rein in the agencies and ensure they remained accountable to the legislative and judicial branches. Nevertheless, agencies continued to propagate rule after rule, building entire bureaucratic edifices outside of explicit congressional authorization. Recall how the Environmental Protection Agency interpreted the Clean Water Act of 1973 in such a way as to tell the Sackett family of North Idaho that they could not build a house near a ditch that sometimes filled with water. (The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sacketts last year.)
This reaction shows the true feelings of the progressive left regarding their so-called sacred democracy:
You see, if someone is to rule, it shouldn’t be judges, or even the people’s representatives. It should be experts, technocrats who know better than rubes like us. Despite their repeated claims that we are a democracy, this system of unelected bureaucrats making and enforcing their own laws instead resembles an oligarchy. The assumption at the heart of the technocratic ideal is that American citizens are not fit to govern ourselves, or even to choose representatives to govern on our behalf. No, we need experts who will rule over us for our own good. C.S. Lewis recognized this conceit many years ago:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
A great example of this attitude was revealed by the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s exposé of the Department of Health and Welfare’s complete disregard for legislative intent over the past few years. Elke Shaw-Tulloch, administrator of the Division of Public Health, was caught on a Zoom call explaining how they were planning to sidestep conservative lawmakers:
We’ll see some shifts in the politics of our state over time… I actually had a really great conversation with a legislator who said it’s going to get worse before it gets better. This is some national movement and some of these very conservative organizations that are going from state to state to state to do exactly this. It’s this disruption… just know that we’re not alone. It feels yucky and gross but these, I think these sands will shift… and we’ll have to just kind of go through, ride this wave for a while and do what we can. And we might be doing some things a little bit more quietly than we used to…
The left pulled perhaps the biggest sleight of hand in world history when they convinced Americans that their ideological program was, in fact, not ideological at all:
- Health district mask mandates were simply following “the science” but conservatives protesting were “injecting politics” into it.
- Public schools teaching critical race theory and radical gender ideology is basic pedagogy, but when parents start asking questions in school board meetings, they are “politicizing” the issue (and are probably domestic terrorists too).
- Injecting transgenderism into every facet of American life, even demanding that men must be allowed in women’s locker rooms and official government literature must say that men can get pregnant, is considered objective science, but anyone who questions such nonsense is labeled a radical bigot.
Remember when Dr. Tony Fauci, who went on cable news programs to deliver his edicts like Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, said that criticizing him was criticizing “science”?
This is the essence of the technocratic mindset. “My” positions are objective, rational, and based on SCIENCE, while your positions are superstitious, backwards, and crassly ideological.
Chevron Deference meant that courts were required to defer to each agency’s own interpretation of the laws Congress passed, which were often intentionally vague. Now that the doctrine has been overturned, it’s up to Congress to actually pass laws that are narrow and specific, which might leave less time for photo ops and fundraising calls.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah explained why this is so important in a long thread on Twitter:
Allow me to say that the left lost their collective minds quite some time ago. I would love to see the unelected ‘experts’ at the state level be reigned in…LOOKING at you Calif.