The Supreme Court Might Just Crush The Regulatory State Soon

Here’s a tweet stream which should make for some interesting thoughts…

Uh oh.

In the event that Alito is able to wrangle the other conservatives on the Supreme Court to require congressional action to authorize the administrative state to make substantive policy, it’s probably the end of the imperial executive branch.

And probably the end of the imperial federal government, too.

This is the kind of thing we’re talking about when we note a new political era is coming. We’re not saying that Jay Kuo is correct in predicting Alito’s dicta in that 2019 case will now become law from the new Supreme Court majority.

But we wouldn’t be surprised if the majority didn’t take some steps to pare back the administrative state or at least empower Congress to do it given the GOP majority likely on Capitol Hill after this year’s midterms.

Most of the changes to our society over the past 15 years or so, almost all of them having a deleterious effect on the happiness of the American people, were top-down and imposed by people we didn’t vote for. You could perhaps argue that includes the Supreme Court, but the justices are a foreseeable product of the elected presidents who appoint them. The administrative and regulatory state, on the other hand, increasingly operates as an autonomous entity immune to the public’s attempts to control it through the results of elections.

And if that were to change, if the EPA, FDA, DOJ and other agencies were re-yoked to the people through Congressional control, their power would be greatly reduced.

But what’s more, the burden on Congress to oversee these agencies would become unworkable in short order.

A Democrat Congress would resolve that problem by simply giving the agencies a specific blank check to make policy. But a Republican Congress would solve it by devolving power to the states currently being held in Washington.

Again – we’re not predicting this will happen as a result of West Virginia v. EPA. But we would expect to see movement in that direction.

And just a little movement could cause a seismic shift in Americans having more freedom to live our lives and do business unfettered by our ruling elite.