Imagine if when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, they drew a sharp line between public and private discrimination. Maybe in Katzenbach v. McClung they drew a bright line around the Commerce Clause and ruled that as long as you were not conducting business across state lines, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not apply to your business. In other words, what if the court said that the principles of discrimination and inclusion apply only to the government?
The answer is we would have a vastly different world. Just consider the Katzenbach case in which the court claimed that the restaurant in question was not doing business across state lines, but it was possible that it could one day buy product from a vendor in another state, so the Commerce Clause applied. If the court had ruled rationally, we would now have a world where private discrimination was still legal, just as long as you did it locally, not nationally.
Of course, if the court had drawn the line between private discrimination and public discrimination, most of our race troubles never would have manifested, because normal life would not contradict official morality. A colorblind state is well within the spirit and sensibility of the American people. The liberty to associate or disassociate with whom you choose, for any reason you choose, is also consistent with the history and sensibilities of the people.
That is not what happened, and we have suffered a half century of demographic collapse as a result of the court imposing a new moral framework. It is a good example of how even small changes in the law can lead to a revolution in how people interact with each other and the government. We may be seeing another revolution brewing with the most recent court rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors.
The Loper decision ends what has been called the “Chevron deference” which is the longstanding principle where the courts defer to federal agencies with regards to regulations, interpretation of regulations and enforcement of regulations. Put simply, if a business or industry did not like a federal regulation, they had to convince the regulators to change it or get help from Congress. The courts would defer to the alleged experts in the administrative state.
What the Supreme Court has done in these two cases is continue to dismantle the logic that animated the Chevron deference and much of administrative law. They are going about it in two ways. One is the Court is saying that these agencies only have powers explicitly granted to them by Congress. Second, companies and industries can now go into the courts for redress. They can challenge the expertise of the regulators and the process used by the agencies to make policy.
This may sound arcane and boring, but keep in mind that most of the federal rules that directly impact your life are not passed by Congress. In fact, no one in Congress can tell you how most of the rules come into existence. The reason for that is the federal agencies craft the rules that regulate every nook and cranny of life. Until now, they did so without having to answer to anyone. Technically, Congress oversees these agencies, but Congress is full of simpletons.
What the Court seems to imagine is a new paradigm. If the Gaia worshippers, for example, want to ban gas stoves, they will need to get enough votes in Congress for a ban on gas stoves. Currently, they just have to cajole or bribe people in the administrative state and convince industry that they can profit from the new shenanigans in order to ban your gas stove. You, the citizen, have nowhere to turn to get your gas stove back.
There are now over 200,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and few people have the slightest idea what they mean. This is why large companies have lawyers who interface with the agencies overseeing their industry. It is why small and midsized companies have trade groups. It is why there is a large army of lawyers whose specialty is administrative law. This is because the leviathan, which is the administrative state, has tentacles reaching into your most private matters.
What made this all possible was the habit of Congress, going back to FDR, to grant agencies in the executive branch broad powers to make laws, interpret those laws and enforce those laws. The way they did this is to give an agency a mission and then a budget to set off on that mission, which was used to lobby Congress for more money to expand the scope of the mission and underwrite various schemes that allegedly were in pursuit of their mission.
The direction of the Court is to ignore the vague powers granted by Congress and focus only on the specific powers granted by Congress. If Congress passes the Puppies and Rainbows bill that authorizes the Department of Education to do what they can to promote puppies and rainbows, the Court will not intervene. Once the DoE makes a rule requiring puppies and rainbows in the schools, then a school system can go to court arguing that the DoE was never granted this power.
There is a long road to go and many more court cases to define this new paradigm, but the end of that road is an administrative state that is limited by the specific powers granted to it and one that must defend its rules in court when challenged. For the same reason our coins have ridges, bills coming out of Congress will have to come with specifics, rather than pages of esoteric language designed to give the administrative state unlimited power to craft new rules.
In the short term, it means that every comma in those 200,000 pages of Federal regulations is now open to challenge in the courts. Inevitably, some popular rules will be struck down and that means Congress will be forced to pass actual laws reestablishing those popular rules. On the other hand, it also means there is a chance to get rid of odious rules that serve narrow interests. Getting a light bulb ban through Congress, for example, never would have happened.
It is not all puppies and rainbows. Rich people have been bribing Congress for generations and America presently has the worst class of rich people since the French Revolution, so it means lots of terrible laws from Congress. The difference is that this stuff will be out in the open where now it is in the shadows, allowing both Congress and its wealthy owners to play dumb and pretend to be something other than odious carbuncles strip-mining the middle-class.
Civil rights looked like a small change in private behavior in pursuit of a greater good, but it led to the demographic madness of the present. These rulings in pursuit of reducing the managerial state to mere bureaucracy may not look like much, but they threaten the moral authority of managerialism. Rule by experts no longer make sense when experts can be challenged. This may one day give people room to salvage whatever is left of the American experiment.
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“That is not what happened, and we have suffered a half century of demographic collapse as a result of the court imposing a new moral framework.”
Oh, that’s a great point I never thought of before. By blowing up naturally occurring social patterns, you’ve also blown up the way people meet and mate? Is that what you’re trying to get at?
The reason we cannot defend ourselves against a mass invasion is that it has been made immoral to operate any sort of closed association, so everyone gets access to white societies. This is why every conservative blabbers about opposing illegal immigration and loving legal immigration.
The whittling of freedom of association started with ruling covenant contracts unconstitutional, and the ethnic cleansing that happened in the cities because of it.
More simply, the court could have gone along with what the Constitution actually says: the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the government, while private discrimination is expressly allowed by the First Amendment (freedom of assembly/association). The government has to be evenhanded, but the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional.
“Getting a light bulb ban through Congress, for example, never would have happened.” Although nobody liked the light bulb ban at the time, don’t you need to push people into things sometimes? As far as I’m concerned those curly fluorescent bulbs were crap, but they work quickly replaced with LED lights, which are superior to both. “Rich people have been bribing Congress for generations and America presently has the worst class of rich people since the French Revolution, so it means lots of terrible laws from Congress. The difference is that this stuff will be out in the open where… Read more »
” As far as I’m concerned those curly fluorescent bulbs were crap, but they work quickly replaced with LED lights, which are superior to both.” That’s what they said before they forced this upon us, but all of their new light bulbs are Made in China, so they burn out about as quick as the old incandescents, and cost more. And I am sick and tired of having to look for one that puts out as much light as an old 100 Watt bulb. They seem stuck on 75 Watts for everyone. I supposed we don’t need to read anything… Read more »
However, with commercial lighting, LEDs have also replaced mercury vapor, which gives off an awful light and sodium vapor, which gives off an awful orange hue. Metal halide is also disappearing. Metal halide didn’t give off such bad light, but LEDs are still superior.
Who knows? We may actually like electric cars when they finally succeed in forcing them on us.
LED street lights, when they fail, also have the novel effect of turning into a black* light. At least that’s what I’ve seen around Tampa. And the failure rate looks fairly high, to judge by the frequency of the psychedelic illumination.
*I don’t know the technical details, but I find it curious that they only seem to fail as blue, not the other colors that are required to make white light.
Ebikes are taking over, ecars not so much. I’m OK with ebikes, especially for cargo bikes. If I wanted a cargo bike, it would be electric, but for getting around, I’d still rather have the workout. The reason they’re booming is that they make riding less laborious (work, yuck), and existing battery tech will give you an adequate range for a bike, so you don’t have to stop in the middle of a trip and charge. Ecars have neither of these advantages, so far. Absent a revolution in battery tech, I don’t see ecars catching on. They’ve been trying them… Read more »
Preferring LED to sodium light is the surest brainwashed “bugman” tell.
Retvrn to flip phone before your manboobs start dispensing soy milk.
Yes, the old incandescents were the best and the cheapest…We stocked up at the time, and are still using them…
My experience with LEDs must be very different because I put LED bulbs in all my fixtures when I moved into my current house 4 years ago and haven’t replaced one yet. I remember have to change incandescents at least once a year back when we were using them. I bought LEDs at $15 for a 24-pack. The cheapest I ever bought incandescents was 3 for $2. So, not only are the LEDs more durable, but nominally cheaper.
This is the broken windows fallacy. If the LED bulbs were truly better, there would be no need to ban normal bulbs. The jury is still out on the alleged superiority of LED. In my experience, you have to use more of them to get the same effect as from incandescent. There is also the issue of blue light being hard on human eyes. Regardless, the light bulb scam is a great example of how the system works. The bulb makers saw a huge windfall, so they backed this scheme while pretending to feet drag. Meanwhile, there was no public… Read more »
If the LED bulbs were truly better, there would be no need to ban normal bulbs. The jury is still out on the alleged superiority of LED. Now do automobiles. Haul the EPA and NHTSA into court and kill the CAFE regulations and these EV diktats! Sorry Elon, better hope SpaceX and X bring in more cash. 😏 If I want a Big Ol’ Car powered by a Big Honking V8 and have the money to pay for the gasoline that powers it, then By Goodness I want to have said automobile and drive it. Likewise, if I want a… Read more »
Cars are a great example of the lunacy of the system. We cannot buy a normal truck for home use, because the regs force the car makers into making pickup trucks into hillbilly Cadillacs.
2700K (iirc) LEDs. Close to incandescent color. I’ve been using them for 8 years. Maybe 2 have burned out so far. Not bad, not clearly better, but they do draw less power.
I have a mix in the new place. The thing is, the cost difference is still significant. The lights above my kitchen cabinets are the recessed jobs. The LED model is $25. The prior owner left about a dozen incandescent bulbs, so I am good for a while, but I tested one LED and it is not as bright as the others.
I am not opposed to LED. I do worry about the blue light issue with them. I would like to have the choice.
Nudge your way back to Chicago, Mr. Sunstein.
Nothing at this point can fix a State that is a dictatorship for all to see now. We don’t even know who runs the country, but you can bet its someone in the Federal Government who is unelected, who is a Democrat, and whose is intent to legalize a one-party state. This Leviathan of like-minded Democrat Communists who are entrenched for life by law in their government jobs will never be overturned since they essentially control everything. This cancer will never be excised when the whole body is a cancer. The only thing that can fix this problem at this… Read more »
Nearly all “laws” enforced during COVID, from masks to vaccines to lockdown, at the Federal, State, and Local level were these bureaucratic “laws”. They would say something vague like “follow CDC guidance”, and then threaten people with Federal prison sentences for noncompliance.
Elected officials loved this arrangement because passing mask laws would have been very unpopular. Instead, they let bureaucrats run amok.
A lot of people got arrested, their businesses shuttered, etc. for not following rules of the managerial state. This ruling appears to end that lunacy.
It is a game of good cop – bad cop, but the bad cop is the invisible hand of the administrative state.
But not so invisible these days…
Throughout covid, I wondered how far people would let “county health departments” get away with those rules before people started burning their houses down.
Pretty far, it turned out.
And thanks to Trump’s declaration of a state of national emergency, they were able to do it: https://www.macpac.gov/subtopic/federal-emergency-authorities/
And where did the authority for that declaration come from?
This is one of the most obtuse TDS takes ever. Executives at every level from city, to county, to national assumed dictatorial powers to invent and enforce new rules/laws, over the entire industrialized world, during covid. The technical details are all irrelevant. There was a panic providing a pretext to grab power, and they grabbed. It cannot be blamed on Trump.
To be fair, it was probably a good idea at the time because no one knew anything about Covid-19. Also to be fair, he should have reversed it after the first couple weeks once it became clear that a) it wasn’t as bad as they feared and b) the bureaucracy was corrupt and taking advantage.
Upvote, but disagree no one knew anything about it. Fauci and Collins practically created it. They knew 1) it was wildly transmissible because they engineered it with gain of function in their biolab, and thus all “slow the spread” measures were useless, and 2) the fatality rate was the same as the flu, and thus all vaccine coercions were immoral.
That’s true, to a point. But also remember that in SCOTUS’ immunity ruling they defenestrated the ability of the managerial state to prosecute a President who doesn’t do what he is told.
They used that weapon against Trump a lot before and during covid.
It’s as if the court was ok with the Chevron deference until it was radically abused during the plandemic, kind of like how there had been no need for precedent on presidential immunity since nobody had bothered to really test it, until just recently. As if the court is now attempting to pull the reins on Clown World.
The great lesson of 2020: Laws don’t matter at all. Only “personnel” does. Covid, BLM, and the “installation” made police and soldiers irreconcilable enemies of every citizen. The “warriors” will never get over the deep, sadistic, sexual pleasure they got from being officially aimed away from criminal enemies—their mostly collegial but occasionally dangerous rivals for politicians’ favor—and pointed at wholly innocent, unexpecting citizens. Every “good cop” retired. Every “good soldier” was cashiered. There were almost none of either. Now there’s not a single one anywhere. So, the Court made a couple good decisions, and at least one unprecedentedly bad one.… Read more »
There now over 200,000 pages in the code of federal regulations…. This is the problem in a nutshell and while these rulings are a good start, it’ll probably take decades to achieve any meaningful results. As many have opined around here, reform with regards to the managerial state is impossible. Something far more significant is going to have to occur for any semblance of sanity and reasonableness to return.
“…it’ll probably take decades to achieve any meaningful results.”
This is exactly right. And we don’t have decades. We have at most just a few years. It will take something a little more explosive than law to rid ourselves of these petty tyrants and sycophants.
This is exactly right. To overturn a regulation, the injured party will have to start in lower courts, which will simply not follow this ruling, and then appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. That takes a lot of time and money.
Indeed, overturning Chevron is momentous, a much more important decision than Dobbs, which overturned Roe v.Wade….We had been aware that Roberts, and one or two other conservatives, had been looking for this opportunity for some time, and the perfect case of overreach showed up…
In the past, the Court had sometimes deplored the abuse of power by the EPA and other agencies, but generally just remanded the cases…
Z-man’s very pointed comparison to the civil rights cases is outstanding…If a lunch counter in Atlanta is in interstate commerce, then everything is….Thank you, Justice Douglas and the rest of FDR’s hacks…
Agree. The moral claim they used to justify this is that the lunch counter owner goes beyond his circle of friends, and opens his business to the general public. Thus, if he allows in strangers, he is not really choosing his acquaintances and cannot discriminate. Fair enough, but it still ain’t interstate commerce.
These rulings in pursuit of reducing the managerial state to mere bureaucracy may not look like much, but they threaten the moral authority of managerialism. Rule by experts no longer make sense when experts can be challenged. This may one day give people room to salvage whatever is left of the American experiment. Agree with all of that excerpt except the implication the American experiment can be salvaged. It died long ago. Still, CHEVRON’s long overdue death is much like relocating away from diversity in that it provides a modicum of relief in the interim. To add just a bit,… Read more »
I disagree that anyone is dumber than the members of congress. The regulators are worse in that they are clever zealots. I do agree the American experiment is over. We can’t go back to 1859, but can only forge something new from the rubble.
“For the same reason our coins have ridges, bills coming out of Congress will have to come with specifics, rather than pages of esoteric language designed to give the administrative state unlimited power to craft new rules.”
?
Evil jews…?
The end of “Chevron” is one of those decisions that is coming 40 years too late to matter. It is going to hamstring any potential for Trump #2 to use vigorous government action to go after the left and deport (as if that was going to happen anyway). The recent ruling will be used by the left from 2025-2029 to thwart the last gasp of Republican power. Then its significance will be jettisoned through one way or the other when the demographics lock the left into power. The only way to “Save America” is through a radical wielding of power… Read more »
The difference regarding expelling invaders is that this is explicitly the will of congress expressed in the laws it wrote. Thus, Trump’s administrative state should not be hamstrung by this ruling. Mass deportations won’t happen for other reasons, but not because of this ruling.
The way I’ve felt this week, is this how leftists felt back when the Warren court was taking a wrecking ball to the republic? Probably not, because I’m still kind of in disbelief/hearing footsteps/waiting on the other shoe to drop. Shell shock, I think it used to be called.
This ruling has literally saved your life. The green agenda, the EV mandates, and the administrative war on oil and coal would have destroyed the economy, killed off most of humanity, and reduced the survivors to living like beasts if it had been implemented. Now we have the legal means to stop it, and the well-heeled energy companies are sure to have their lawyers on the case even now. A prayer of thanks for the SCOTUS. One of the few bright spots going forward is that America still has enough carbon fuel in the ground to supply a relatively prosperous,… Read more »
All of the things that liberals have been whining about with regards to SCOTUS the past few years could be addressed by Congress. In fact, Congress did address one, when, in a truly stunning show of bipartisan unity, it legalized gay “marriage.” Overall though, liberals cannot get major buy-in on their agenda and they know it. The entire liberal, progressive, globohomo project – the arc of history, as King Obama called it, is built on the accumulation and expression of power. Changing the laws doesn’t matter when you have no means to execute the laws. Marijuana was de facto legalized… Read more »