Free Republic

Every schoolkid knows -- or used to know -- that the United States has three branches of government. At least that's what the textbooks say. But really, we have four branches of government. That's because Congress -- the legislative branch -- has for decades delegated lawmaking authority to the unconstitutional fourth branch of the U.S. government: independent regulatory agencies. By some estimates, there are more than 300 of these agencies sticking their nose into every aspect of American life and business, from what kind of car you can buy to the temperature setting on your thermostat to what you can...

Irely on experts. Everyone should. Sick? Visit the doctor. Tooth trouble? The dentist. Car trouble? The mechanic. Climbing Mount Everest? Hire a guide. Want to come closer to God? A church near you meets at 10:30 or 11 this Sunday. Experts are indispensable aides to lives well-lived. Trust Us, a new documentary from the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses experts in a wholly different role. These experts do not offer advice. They issue commands. The documentary considers the role experts assumed in the twentieth century: figuring out what you should do and how you should do it. You aren’t just to...

Voters who think that putting Republicans in control of the House and Senate will make a big difference for the economy are in for a rude awakening. President Joe Biden has unleashed the regulatory Leviathan. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed to stop the damage. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal. The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it...

The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy.The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats. The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting...

The Next Ten BattlesIt is apparently much easier to tell the truth about state action the farther away it is from home. And hence even the New York Times seems alarmed at the covid lockdowns in Shanghai, and pretending as if nothing like that could happen here even though the whole practice of lockdown the world over was directly copied from the Wuhan model. “China is meddling with free enterprise as it hadn’t in decades,” says the paper. “The results are familiar to those old enough to remember: scarcity, and the rise of black markets.”The disruptions are especially difficult for...

During an interview aired on Thursday’s edition of CNN+’s “The Source with Kasie Hunt,” White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci reacted to the CDC’s transportation mask mandate being struck down in court by stating that “we are concerned…about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions. I mean, this is a CDC issue. It should not have been a court issue.”

It is the thesis of this monumentally argued book that the United States Supreme Court - largely through abuses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, has embarked on "a continuing revision of the Constitution, under the guise of interpretation." Consequently, the Court has subverted America's democratic institutions and wreaked havoc upon Americans' social and political lives. One of the first constitutional scholars to question the rise of judicial activism in modern times, Raoul Berger points out that "the Supreme Court is not empowered to rewrite the Constitution, that in its transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment it has demonstrably done...

Disaster The gravity of this issue is wildly out of proportion with the small amount of attention it's receiving in the broader conversation about this election. I took a train up to New York City the April after President Trump’s inauguration to cover a “Times Talk” discussion featuring Camille Paglia and Andy Cohen. Early in the event, Paglia said the moment she predicted Trump would win the 2016 election was when the Obama administration pushed transgender bathrooms. “There’s the election, right there,” she remembered thinking. That line stuck with me. It was, Paglia added, the “worst moment to approach a...

Acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, the National Labor Relations Board is just the tip of the iceberg of government agencies wielding far too much power. “No jokes allowed. Ever.” Apparently, this is the new Twitter rule, as The Federalist national news publication faces a joint administrative and judicial broadside at the National Labor Relations Board. What the publication is going through constitutes just one of the many costly, silly, and arguably unconstitutional quasi-judicial proceedings underway throughout the federal bureaucracy.A recent case before the NLRB — in which the agency served as legislator, police, prosecutor, and judge — helps illustrate...

Virus management is about power and control, the two things the elite always want and therefore don’t want to relinquish even when the virus recedes. The big-picture story of American politics of the last four years has been a battle royale between elite power structures and millions of ordinary Americans. Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, the Russia collusion hoax, and the impeachment drama were all essentially tussles between elite control and democratic norms, between the will of the powerful and the will of the 2016 voters, a.k.a. Trump supporters. A loose assortment of unelected bureaucrats, D.C. power players, Democratic leaders,...

President Donald Trump is trying to take an ax to federal advisory committees, ordering that their numbers be slashed. Trump signed an executive order Friday that directs every federal agency to evaluate the need for all of its advisory committees created under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And it gives agency heads until September to terminate at least one-third of current committees created by agency heads. Federal advisory committees are typically made up of private citizens who offer advice and assistance to the executive branch. The White House did not immediately provide any justification for the order. But it appears...

The White House is moving to do what no president has accomplished since World War II: eliminate a major federal agency. If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government. The agency would be pulled apart and its functions divided among three other departments. An executive order directing parts of the transition by the fall is in the final stages of review, administration officials said, with an announcement by President Trump likely by summer. OPM employees were briefed at a meeting...

WASHINGTON — It has been practically a given that anyone nominated for a federal judgeship by a Republican president had to pass an unspoken litmus test — usually on abortion but often on any number of divisive social issues. The Trump administration has a new litmus test: reining in what conservatives call “the administrative state.” With surprising frankness, the White House has laid out a plan to fill the courts with judges devoted to a legal doctrine that challenges the broad power federal agencies have to interpret laws and enforce regulations, often without being subject to judicial oversight. Those not...

Sue and Settle. Over the years, special interest groups skirted the regulatory process by using lawsuits that seek to force federal agencies – especially EPA – to issue regulations that advance their interests and priorities, on their specified timeframe. During this process, known as “sue and settle,” EPA would get sued by an outside party that asked the court to compel the Agency to take certain steps, either through change in a statutory duty or enforcing timelines set by the law, and then EPA would acquiesce through a consent decree or settlement agreement, affecting the Agency’s obligations under the statute....

Subtitle: Outsourcing the Law. Imagine turning off the news media. Imagine not just turning it off but isolating yourself from it for a month. A fishing and hunting trip without any electronic devices would do the trick. Upon your return, you find out that congress had charged, tried, and found guilty all the higher echelon Obama administration officials who abused their offices to overthrow candidate and President Trump. You are told that because the executive and judicial branches wouldn’t do their jobs, congress decided to step in and punish Obama, Rice, Lynch, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Priestap and Page. Of course,...

Without question, the most distinctive feature of the modern social democratic state is the rise of administrative agencies, which at the federal level function as a shadowy Fourth Branch of government that fits uneasily into our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, and which at the state level oversee vast swaths of economic activity...Defenders of the current administrative setup claim the elaborate procedural safeguards built into today's administrative law effectively blunt the risk of arbitrary power, whose exercise has always been in tension with the rule of law. In this talk, Professor Epstein will explain why he thinks the massive...

I can hear the eyes glazing over. From Article I § 1 “We the People,” in a straightforward sentence, loaned limited lawmaking powers to a Congress of the United States. What could be clearer? Despite the clarity, most lawmaking these past hundred years drifted from congress to executive branch agencies. Specialists in various disciplines from the environment, workplace and labor relations, education, energy, and the law itself (DOJ), busy themselves writing progressive regulations on behalf of the President. But, for many, the pace of transformation was still too slow. To speed societal progress, a recent democrat congress infamously exempted a...

There’s a chance that what ails the GOP is terminal, but to give ourselves a chance at recovery, we’ve got to move—physically. The Republican Party is sick, so sick it can’t breathe, and its lack of oxygen has given it severe muscle fatigue. There’s a chance that what ails the GOP is terminal, but to give ourselves a chance at recovery, we’ve got to move—physically.The party’s national committees, think-tank brains, campaign strategists, and government functionaries all live in the fever swamps of Washington that firmly anchor the snotty southern end of the Acela Corridor. The GOP’s elected and unelected leaders...

'Doing better than Ronald Reagan' to cut rules! Under the Obama administration, the White House, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies repeatedly circumvented Congress by using guidance memos to create de facto regulations, changing laws without going through the review process. In less than a year, however, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back government overreach, Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, told WND. “Guidance typically from the department means there is some question about how to do this, because of the way it was ambiguously written, so a federal agency would provide...

Justice Neil Gorsuch gave the most significant public address of his tenure on the nation’s highest court Thursday when he addressed the Federalist Society’s annual dinner, recently named in honor of the last man to hold his seat: Antonin Scalia. The newest Supreme Court justice took square aim at one of this year’s Federalist Society Convention’s main themes: the “administrative state,” the unelected mass of executive agency staff that actually creates most of the rules and regulations by which Americans live. Resistance of the administrative state’s growth and overreach is a driving force in the emergence of populist-nationalism and the...