Posted on 05/05/2023 6:52:29 AM PDT by Twotone
Should the Food and Drug Administration be allowed to approve whatever drugs it wants however it wants because the FDA is the expert on drug safety and efficacy?
Should Congress defer to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and let stand a rule that is nonsensical and harmful?
And here’s the general question: should executive branch agencies have broad authority to make whatever rules they want to accomplish their aims, as long as Congress hasn’t explicitly prohibited it?
For too many politicians, regulators, and commentators, the answer is “yes.” “Believe in Science” or “Trust the Experts” has come to mean that the executive branch can make its own law. Put less provocatively, much of the political class rejects one basic principle of the Constitution, which is that Congress is the boss of the government.
The Supreme Court is taking up a new case regarding some fishermen, which brings into question the Chevron doctrine — a rule of jurisprudence whereby judges give broad leeway to regulators when Congress’s statutes are ambiguous. If you believe the reaction from some on the Left, it’s a secret Federalist Society plot to bring about a deregulated libertarian utopia — a “war on federal regulation,” as Democratic commentator Ian Milhiser puts it at Vox.
The case in question, Loper v. Raimondo, is not a war on regulation. The fishermen don’t really even take a side on the question of more regulation or less. In fact, the court isn’t even considering whether or not to discard the Chevron doctrine. At issue is a narrow question: Can a federal agency do something that Congress never authorized it to do, as long as Congress never explicitly prohibited it?
Congress authorized the National Marine Fisheries Service to create fishery management plans and to place monitors on fishing boats to enforce their regulations. In 2020, the NMFS began charging the fishermen for the pleasure of hosting this regulator on their boats, even though Congress definitely never gave the NMFS the authority to collect fees from the plaintiffs.
What the Biden administration argues today is that Congress generally gave the NMFS the authority to regulate these boats, never said the NMFS couldn’t collect these fees, and that the NMFS believes that collecting these fees is necessary for doing its job.
That is, they are asserting that the law’s silence on the fees creates an ambiguity, and that under the Chevron doctrine, the courts ought to defer to the agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language.
The fishermen argue back: “Silence is not ambiguity, especially when the extraordinary power of making the citizenry pay for the cost of regulatory enforcement is expressly granted in three limited and obviously inapplicable circumstances.”
Some of this is legal finery, but the broader question is the prior one: Who is the boss? Is it the regulators, or the elected representatives of the people? Sadly too many of our elites want to rest lawmaking power with the bureaucrats.
It’s almost like non elected officials are running the government.
They need to look up the word they use frequently..democracy.
Although, I doubt they care. They make their own rules and just as easily break their own rules.
And the statist/government-power party (the Democrats) is perfectly happy to see this situation continue.
Congress is only the boss when Pelosi is speaker.
Its also exactly why term limits on Congress is a terrible idea.
Congressmen are the ONLY thing in bloated Fed.gov that people have control over - and term limits would make your elected representatives tourists in Washington DC.
Why does NO ONE discuss term limits on permanent Fed.gov bureaucrats???
Look at the power (and wealth) of people like Fauci, Comey, Walensky, built over decades of climbing through the bureaucracy. When did they ever face election? What public scrutiny are they accountable to?
Actually it is the deep state that is bossing the government.
"It’s not popular to say, but Congress is the boss of the government"
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
The Constitution is the ultimate boss of the state and federal governments, the states uniquely having the power to amend the Constitution.
Regarding healthcare issues, it remains that the states have never expressly constitutionally given the big, bad feds the specific power to dictate healthcare policy for the states.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added]” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
In fact, the congressional record shows that Rep. John Bingham, a constitutional lawmaker, had emphasized that the drafters of the Constitution had left the care of the people to the states, not the federal government.
”Simply this, that the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Constitution, is in the States and not in the federal government [emphases added]. I have sought to effect no change in that respect in the Constitution of the country.” —John Bingham, Congressional. Globe. 1866, page 1292 (see top half of third column)
In other words, so-called federal healthcare policy is actually based on stolen state powers that the corrupt feds regularly steal from the states.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
The main reason that the people are now being oppressed under the boots of an unconstitutionally big federal government is this imo. Constitutionally low-information voters unthinkingly abuse their 17th Amendment (17A) power to elect federal senators by electing crook lawmakers to the Senate who promise unconstitutional federal spending programs to the voters to get themselves elected.
In other words, 17A effectively repealed the federal government's constitutionally limited powers which was the main purpose of the Constitution.
Patriots, the bottom line is this imo. What is your threshold of “pain” for peacefully stopping unconstitutionally big state and federal governments controlled by bully, constitutionally undefined political parties, from oppressing the people?
The inevitable remedy for ongoing, post-17A ratification, corrupt political party treason (imo)...
All MAGA patriots need to wake up their RINO federal and state lawmakers by making the following clear to them.
If they don’t publicly support either a resolution, or a Constitutional Convention, to effectively "secede" ALL the states from the unconstitutionally big federal government by amending the Constitution to repeal the 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments (16&17A), doing so before the primary elections in 2024, that YOU will primary them.
If the proposed amendment was limited strictly to repealing 16&17A, relatively little or ideally no discussion would be needed before ratification of the amendment imo.
With 16&17A out of the way, my hope is that Trump 47 becomes the FIRST president of a truly constitutionally limited power federal government.
In the meanwhile, consider that it's not Trump's problem to pick patriot candidates for office who understand and respect the federal government's constitutionally limited powers. It's the duty of patriots to keep abreast of public affairs and pick good candidates for public office.
“Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves [emphasis added]. It seems to be the law of our general nature.” - Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Edward Carrington January 16, 1787)
Democrats Are Terrified Of An Educated And Informed Public (3.12.23)
Regular readers of Free Republic could probably do a better job of picking candidates for 2024 elections than Trump imo, Trump evidently getting bad advice about who to endorse from institutionally indoctrinated, corrupt politically party-aligned advisors.
The rule for primarying candidates in 2024 is to get rid of all career lawmakers since they have repeatedly proven that they don't make a difference in killing bad government policy.
The definition of insanity is reelecting your state's beloved, Constitution-ignoring career state and federal lawmakers and executives over and over again, expecting different results every time.
.
The original progressives designed it to run exactly as it does today. When "progressive thinkers" like Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, and many others talked/wrote about separating administration from politics, what they meant was specifically reducing the voting populace's ability to have a say in what gets administered - this necessarily means reducing the power of congress. Considering that Congress are the duly elected representatives of the people.
Two important works that make this easy to understand are Wilson's essay "The Study of Administration", which can easily be said to be the birth certificate of the deep state or all of modern administration, and then there's Herbert Croly's highly influential work "The Promise of American Life"
https://librivox.org/the-promise-of-american-life-herbert-croly/
https://librivox.org/search?q=the%20study%20of%20administration&search_form=advanced
The Promise of American Life by Herbert David Croly
Text and audio of both. (open source)
Maybe on paper, but in reality they have zero enforcement power.
Some will say that congress controls the money, but the truth is that they’re terrified of forcing a spending showdown, and it’s a moot point really if one party controls the senate and the other the house.
So, in reality, the executive branch runs the governnment and enforces what it wants and has the power to arrest, fight, withhold, etc.
The only possible means is for congress to have the judicial branch declare an action of the executive branch not supported by law. That will halt some things, but violators can’t be prosecuted by the judicial, because they don’t have an enforcement arm, either.
What about if congressmen represented 10,000 citizens and not the 600,000 they do today? It would be more inline with original representation, reduce influence of $$ and with the internet, no need to be located in DC.
At the rate that Biden is churning out EO’s-—why do we even have a Congress———
SEEMS all the rules are coming from the OVAL OFFICE.
School House Rock taught me everything I need to know about how an idea becomes a bill and then becomes law.
Should Einstein have ever appeared before Congress, those self-bloated know it alls would laugh him out the door.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.