Supreme Court Kneecaps Administrative State
The United States Supreme Court today threw out 40 years of precedent and overturned the principle of Chevron deference, blowing a huge hole in the power of the administrative state.
In a 6 to 3 ruling (Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson dissented,) the court held that courts do in fact have a role to play when there is a dispute over the interpretation of federal regulatory law.
For the past four decades, the doctrine known as “Chevron deference” (called that because the company was involved in the original case) has said that if there is an issue – such as a lawsuit – with a federal regulation, courts must in the end “defer” to the opinion of the agency “experts” who crafted the law.
In his supporting opinion, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch explained the concept thusly:
When applying Chevron deference, reviewing courts do not interpret all relevant statutory provisions and decide all relevant questions of law. Instead, judges abdicate a large measure of that responsibility in favor of agency officials. Their interpretations of “ambiguous” laws control even when those interpretations are at odds with the fairest reading of the law an independent “reviewing court” can muster…
In other words, if a regulatory agency decides the details of a law passed by Congress are not clear or exact enough it could then interpret them as it saw fit and the poor guy being regulated essentially had almost no recourse to the courts.
That is no longer the case.
A specific issue before the court was whether or not a government agency could not only require that an observer be on a fishing boat but also that the boat owner pay for said government overseer. The clear administrative overreach was enough to get the case – after failing to convince lower courts they shouldn’t have to pay for their own regulator – all the way to the supremes.
Today’s decision vindicates the rule of law. By ending Chevron deference, the Court has taken a major step to preserve the separation of powers and shut down unlawful agency overreach,” said Roman Martinez of Latham and Watkins law firm, which represented one of the two (there were two boats involved) in the case. “Going forward, judges will be charged with interpreting the law faithfully, impartially, and independently, without deference to the government. This is a win for individual liberty and the Constitution.
The dropping of Chevron deference was immediately and vociferously criticized by those who have benefitted directly from such administrative overreach. Hardcore environmental activists, safety mavens, and every other form of “We know better than you, stupid public” group criticized the decision.
In a suitably aghast piece by the Associated Press, that sentiment was clear:
The ruling will likely “gum up the works for federal agencies and make it even harder for them to address big problems. Which is precisely what the critics of Chevron want,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental and energy law program at Harvard Law School… (and) Dustin Cranor of Oceana, another conservation group, said the case “just the latest example of the far right trying to undermine the federal government’s ability to protect our oceans, waters, public lands, clean air and health.’’
Yup – we’re all going to burn or freeze or starve or overeat ourselves to death now – it’s a guarantee.
In her dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan said Congress is incapable of writing complete and comprehensive regulatory rules into every new law and that it should be left to the government “experts” to flesh out the blank spots and/or alleged ambiguities.
…(b)ecause agencies often know things about a statute’s subject matter that courts could not hope to. The point is especially stark when the statute is of a ‘scientific or technical nature.’
During oral arguments, Kagan said essentially the same thing – let the experts handle it.
But leaving omniscient interpretive power in the hands of a bureaucrat tends not to work out terribly well: See Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and Dr. Francis Collins RE: Covid.
And see the deserved devastation of the public trust in the entire expert class over the past five or six years. Kagan’s “trust the experts” argument may have seemed plausible in 1984, but in 2024 is ludicrous.
Michael Lotito, Co-Chair of the Workplace Policy Institute in San Francisco was very pleased the court overturned Chevron.
“It’s a big day for the rule of law,” Lotito said. “The heyday of administrative fiat and overreach is over.”
Lotito added the ruling should send a clear signal to Congress to start “passing laws with real clarity” as to their enforcement.
While the ruling covers all federal activity here in California, it – sadly – does not automatically cover state regulators. Chevron was overturned in part because it didn’t jibe with a federal law known as the Administrative Procedure Act. The Act set standards for public input, clarity, and consistency in rule-making and in defining the scope of judicial review.
California has a similar APA and has practices that can, in part, be said to partly mimic Chevron, but not exactly.
For California to gain the same broad freedoms from regulatory overreach that the feds must now offer, the state Supreme Court would have to get involved.
And that – the Supreme Court limiting the state bureaucratic blob – said Lotito, is highly unlikely to occur.
I mean really really really highly unlikely to occur.
Note – this ruling does NOT impact any case in the past 40 years that has relied on Chevron: “By overruling Chevron, though, the Court does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself…”
Alex Jones Talks Big Picture In Must-Watch Analysis
Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?
After a disastrous debate performance two weeks ago and a weak damage-control interview last Friday, it’s finally become clear to almost everyone that President Joe Biden is not running the federal government.
Every four years, we’re supposed to pretend that a single individual, who we collectively choose at the ballot box, takes charge of the federal government and acts as we would to address the problems we face at home and abroad.
Biden’s inability to get through a debate and a sit-down interview without issues shatters the illusion that he is the one running things in Washington and across America’s globe-spanning sphere of influence.
So, if Biden is not actually running the government, who is?
There are, of course, the people around Biden. Some of his family members—like his wife, Jill Biden, and son, Hunter Biden—have been especially close by these last weeks as the president weathers the debate fallout. There’s also Biden’s closest advisors and political confidants like Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, and Ted Kaufman, who have been at the president’s side since he decided to run in 2020. Finally, there’s the White House staff who does much, if not all, of the day-to-day work.
But this group makes up only a small part of the broader power structure in Washington. To understand where federal power truly lies, we have to zoom out.
The political class in America is made up of countless organizations, departments, and factions. However, four unique groups can be defined.
First are the politicians and all those who are appointed by politicians. Think of presidents, senators, and representatives, but also cabinet members, ambassadors, and federal judges. These are many of the most-visible members of the political class. They’re who people picture when they think of American politics.
Second, there are all the unelected bureaucrats who make up the permanent, administrative components of the federal government. Most of them can be found in the dozens of executive agencies located in and around Washington, DC. Where the first group is made up of a couple thousand people, the second group accounts for close to three million. It’s the bulk of the federal government.
The third group is what we can call the official or “court” intellectuals. These are the “experts” in academia and at think tanks, as well as the “journalists” at the most prominent media organizations, who excuse and justify the actions and ambitions of the rest of the political class.
As Murray Rothbard explained in the third chapter of Anatomy of the State, political authorities have always relied on intellectuals to affirm the state’s legitimacy in the minds of the broader population. Intellectuals, who are often frustrated with how little people are willing to pay for their intellectual services, are easily lured into serving the state’s interest in exchange for official recognition, access, and tax dollars.
The fourth and final group are the plutocrats. They are the people and firms who owe their profits and wealth to the actions of the federal government and who lobby and pay to use government power to line their pockets. Think of the heads of the big banks or the weapons companies that supply Washington’s war machine.
These four groups form the coalition that makes up the political class. The “establishment” simply refers to the established, or current, political class. And, together, this coalition works to empower and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Court intellectuals use their establishment-sanctioned “expertise” to argue that society’s problems must be solved with government interventions. Politicians offer to enact these interventions in exchange for votes and donations. Plutocrats work to warp the interventions to their own benefit and then lobby and pay politicians to legislate even more lucrative interventions. After they are enacted, the easily predicted bad consequences of the interventions are used by court intellectuals and politicians to justify even more interventions.
Meanwhile, the bureaucratic group gains jobs, money, and power that it works with court intellectuals to protect and expand. The ever-growing interventions build up more government power that is then offered up to interested plutocratic buyers. All the while, politicians put on their sham fights with each other over minor policy differences along with their electoral and legislative rituals to obscure the scam and to keep us all believing that we live in a representative democratic republic.
That is the cycle churning in Washington, DC. The fact that the president is cognitively impaired is essentially irrelevant.
That is unless it begins to wake the American public up to the fact that the government does not work for us like we were all taught it does in elementary school. But until then, the churn continues.
Alex Jones Talks Big Picture In Must-Watch Analysis
What Is the Real Economic Story of Our Times?
Will you help us with some important economic research?
We want to get to the bottom of what has happened to the US and world economy since the disaster of lockdowns. Something doesn’t feel right, and we would like to take a more objective look and tell a different story. If you would like to help us raise a total of $25,000 for this important study, you can contribute here.
Here’s the background.
The last four years have presented us with a deeply uncomfortable truth. In a data-soaked world, in which collection and verification have never been easier, much of what comes our way is not reliable.
We learned this during the pandemic response. What seemed like objective science turned out to be subject to a million exigencies of collection, assembly, and presentation. The temptation to manipulate the data to tell a preferred story was too powerful for many to resist.
We gradually came to learn that we were being presented with a false reality. The old wisdom about how to lie with statistics came rushing back, as we dug ever deeper into the mess of data and its hidden implications, many of which flipped the preferred narrative on its head.
As time went on, we discovered ever more. The data did not show that closures controlled the virus at all. Neither did masks. Neither did the vaccines. All impressions in real time were an illusion and probably a deliberate one. After all, the pandemic planners overthrew half a millennium of progress in freedom. How can they admit that it was all for naught?
The Economic Chaos
There is another field that has been similarly affected, namely economics. Starting with the global lockdowns of 2020, the data reflected huge swings in everything from employment to output to trade flows. There was never anything on record that compared. It was the same with government spending, money creation, and the financial markets.
That upheaval gradually faded but left us with real confusion about where we were precisely in the business cycles that have been carefully clocked for more than a hundred years. The conventional wisdom says that those days are long gone and the full recovery is already here.
Are we sure about that? The great inflation of our times began in early 2021 and has continued ever since. According to official calculations, the dollar has lost about 21 cents of value in this time. But looking more carefully, one wonders. Just check this according to your own experience. Does this seem even close to the truth?
The Consumer Price Index excludes interest rates that soared (economists who have looked at that estimate that inflation reached 19 percent in 2022-23), and also the costs of housing and car insurance. The health insurance numbers are measured against medical consumption, yielding figures that are not even slightly believable.
Other factors raise further doubts. The data collectors cannot possibly provide a full accounting of shrinkflation, quality declines, and added fees that never previously existed. Inflation has become a hot potato that everyone hides. Then you have the ubiquitous “hedonic” adjustments that lower prices based on more value based on quality of service rendered.
On the one hand, this seems maybe intuitive. You would rather have a television made now rather than one from twenty years ago even at the same price. On the other hand, do economists really possess the wisdom to know precisely how much to adjust those prices for supposed quality increases? Other measures that exclude hedonic adjustments – calculating a consumer basket according to pre-1983 methods – show inflation at twice the rates.
Retail sales and factory orders are routinely reported with no inflation adjustments in any case. This means that a haircut last month for $20 and one this month for $25 yields a 25% increase in sales even though you have consistently only purchased one haircut each month. It’s the same with factory orders: official data measures increased prices, not more orders.
This makes absolutely no sense. What if all these numbers were adjusted by a realistic figure on inflation?
The Messes Are So Many
The post-lockdown jobs data has been a consistent mess. A large gap has opened up between two surveys: household vs. establishment. The household data shows a large loss in full-time jobs while the establishment data seems to be double and triple-counting to yield consistent increases in jobs.
And what would a more accurate inflation number do to income data? Is it really up or might it be dramatically down? Using official data, it is largely flat of course but what if we adjust for the actual prices people are paying? Household income might have been utterly crushed over four years, precisely as you suspect.
Now we come to Gross National Product, the output measure we use to calculate where we are in the business cycle. Since they were first put together in the 1930s, such national income accounting has classified government spending as increased output. This is why the Second World War seemed to have “saved” the US economy. Economists have long debunked this claim. It took thirty years after the war to flesh it all out but now everyone realizes that the recovery only began in 1948.
But what about the largest increase in government spending in the postwar period that happened in 2020 and 2021? That too is now classified as improved output. These claims have not been debunked though they should be. Moreover, the GDP is reported not in nominal terms but with an inflation adjustment. Two successive quarters of declining real GDP is considered recessionary. But what if we made two adjustments here: excluding government spending from GDP and then adjusting the results by a realistic estimate of inflation?
The Greater Depression
You get the picture. It is possible that we have never truly left the recession or depression that began in 2020. What’s more, this problem might be global. This is the conclusion that we came to in our article posted at Brownstone. Since its posting, we’ve not encountered anyone who has disputed the facts of the case.
If that is so, why are we not hearing more about this?
One suspects that it is for the same reason that we didn’t get the truth during the pandemic period. When a point of view runs contrary to the professional consensus and government messaging priorities, it recedes far in the background. No one has an incentive to tell another version of the official story. Sound familiar? Indeed it does.
In this case, however, the consequences of being wrong are quite dire. If we have been in recession and even depression for four years and do not know it, that would explain so much about what has happened to the US standard of living. All surveys show that both consumers and small businesses are deeply pessimistic. People simply do not believe these official numbers.
The Proposed Study
The study we are hoping to conduct would adjust all data for inflation, retail sales, factory orders, jobs, GDP, and income, and map out three possible scenarios: best case, medium case, and worst case, while showing all our work so it can be checked and disputed by anyone.
Doing such work requires time and some serious technical chops, to which we do indeed have access. Yes, it would be nice if industry or university economists would get busy doing this right now but, as with the Covid experience, it turns out that getting the truth out there requires independent support and publishing. Strange but true.
That means that the hard work falls to Brownstone Institute. If you are interested in helping, you can donate now. If we can raise the funds, the work can begin right away and we hope to have publication ready by the fall, while releasing results along the way.
Why is this so crucial? The official story is that lockdowns did not do any great harm to prosperity, nothing that was lasting in any case. We suspect otherwise. It would be important to know. Otherwise, the history books will forever gloss over the turning point in modern history and perhaps even in the history of civilization.
Surely, we should know the truth, whatever it is. Will you help us find it?
Alex Jones Talks Big Picture In Must-Watch Analysis
White House Covid Response Chief Who Mandated Vaccines Begs Forgiveness: ‘We Caused Harm’
The White House Covid Response Co-ordinator responsible for mandating Covid vaccines for millions of government employees across the United States has finally admitted the mandates were a tragic mistake – and he wants the public […]
The post White House Covid Response Chief Who Mandated Vaccines Begs Forgiveness: ‘We Caused Harm’ appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Illegals Getting SSNs Within Four Months of Crossing Border
Over the past few years illegal immigrants have been given US bank debit cards from the United Nations.
Also:
Pelosi Refuses To Back Biden On MSNBC, Says He Should Make Decision ‘Next Week’
Former Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday where she was bluntly asked if Joe Biden currently has her support as the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate.
Instead of backing Biden, Pelosi awkwardly danced around the question, saying, “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to to make that decision because time is running short.”
.@SpeakerPelosi asked about Biden’s candidacy:
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) July 10, 2024
“I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides we go with.” pic.twitter.com/HqaRGtv2dP
When Pelosi was told Biden has already made his decision, vowing to stay in the race, she was again asked, “Do you want him to run?”
The Democrat politician refused to answer and instead said, “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides we go with. I think it’s really important to let him deal with this NATO conference. This is a very big deal, over thirty heads of state are here. He is the host of it and that means orchestrating the discussion and setting the agenda, and he’s doing so magnificently.”
She added, “I’ve said to everyone, ‘Let’s just hold off. Whatever you’re thinking, tell either tell somebody privately but you don’t have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week.”
This means Democrats have received the memo to lay off Biden until after this week’s NATO Summit in D.C., after which the race to replace the senile puppet will likely resume.