Supreme Court Targets the Real Enemy
By Jeffrey A. Tucker July 1, 2022 Updated: July 1, 2022
The flurry of rulings from the Supreme Court has everyone’s head
spinning. The most significant among them, even if it doesn’t capture
all the headlines, is West Virginia vs EPA. The majority opinion is
impressive but the part I found truly wonderful is the concurring
opinion by Neil Gorsuch. This is where we see things headed, toward a
major and much-welcome curbing of the power of the administrative
state.
Just to review what this thing is, it is the unelected bureaucracy
that rules the country without oversight from voters or legislatures.
For well over 100 years, most courts have given it a pass, just as-
suming that the “experts” in the bureaucracies are handling things
just fine, faithfully interpreting legislation, and merely creating
rules for easy compliance.
Generations have gone by as this 4th branch of government has grown
in size, scope, and strength. For the most part, its baneful imposi-
tions have been felt by one business or one industry at a time. You
have heard the stories. The car dealer complains of how the Department
of Labor is making him crazy. The machine-parts manufacturer is going
bonkers about letters from the Occupational Safety and Health Admini-
stration. The energy company can never satisfy the Environmental Pro-
tection Agency.
They are stories and we find them unfortunate but we’ve generally
avoided thinking of these as systematic, all pervasive, and truly dan-
gerous to the idea of freedom itself. However, there are some 432 of
these agencies. The authors of the Declaration of Independence noted
their existence back in the day when they accused the English king of
having “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of
Officers to harass our People and eat out their Substance.” They
fought a revolution to end the tyranny but now we have a home-grown
form, starting in 1883 with the Pendleton Act and continuing through-
out the 20th century as each new administration creates its own
bureaucracy.
The thing has taken on a power of its own. Strangely, the topic
hardly comes up at all during elections, and this is for a reason.
Politicians running for office like to advertise their power to make
change. They might even believe it. In reality, elected officials
have very little influence over the conduct of public life relative
to the administrative state. As Trump found it, not even the presi-
dent is a match for the deep state.
Here is what has happened since March 2020: the beast showed its
face. Seemingly out of nowhere, these strange agencies and people for
whom we never voted were ruling our lives. They restricted travel,
forced us to cover our faces, closed our churches and schools, and
forbid our businesses from operating unless they were big enough to
afford a powerful lobbying arm in Washington. The whole scene was ap-
palling. It caused many people—including some earnest judges—to take
notice.
Once you see the problem, you cannot unsee it.
Consider the problem with inflation alone: it is largely the re-
sponsibility of the Federal Reserve, which is among the most terrif
ing of the deep-state agencies. This thing was founded in 1913 with
the promise that it would end “wildcat banking” and contain the ex-
pansion of money and credit so that we would have a more stable eco-
nomic environment to encourage growth.
Even now, people believe that the Fed is going to somehow fix
recessions and inflations, even though a deeper analysis reveals that
the Fed itself is the cause of both. The Fed cannot be both the pro-
blem and the solution, surely. This is becoming as obvious as the
fact that the CDC cannot make a textbook pathogen go away with power
and potions.
Let’s take a quick look at the supposed 2 percent inflation target
of the Federal Reserve. It might seem to you that they have long ago
blown past this such that it is entirely cosmetic. But the Fed has a
little trick up its sleeve. It says it doesn’t follow conventional
inflation indexes like the Consumer or Producer Price Index. It is
fancier than that. It follows instead the index of Personal Consump-
Expenditures. And sure enough when we look at the PCE, we find
tion that the Fed is pretty good at its job!
All that changed recently when the PCE itself blew up. Now the Fed
has been revealed to be utterly incompetent, in a way that is not
different from the CDC, NIH, DOL, DOE, DOT, HHS, DHS, FTC, SEC, and
all the rest of these glorified 3-letter agencies employing nearly 3
million people who cannot be fired or controlled. The unique feature
of our times is that the expert class in government has been unmask-
ed as fakes at best and unrelenting menaces as worst.
Here is where the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation stands
today:
So much for competence at the Fed! And yet, how exactly is this
institution supposed to be controlled? We don’t vote for them. The
Fed board is appointed by the president with Senate approval but this
control is mostly mythical. The fancy economists run circles around
the political actors with big words and fancy finance, so what can
they do but approve?
The political class too often acts like absentee owners of a
far-off land: they have little choice but to trust the hired landlords
to do a good job. That’s the administrative machinery that has become
the real power, not only implementing the policies but making and en-
forcing the rules too.
With COVID, this whole scam was revealed to absolutely everyone—
not just to small businesses but to every single individual and family
in the United States. The whole bureaucracy announced to us what they
have always believed but rarely said: your life is not your own. Your
job is to comply. And so this raises the fascinating question of what
precisely are we going for here and what kind of society and govern-
ment do we want? Surely this should be up to the people!
The Supreme Court in its most recent decision was dealing with a
technical aspect of how regulations applied to a coal plant, but the
implications of the decision are much larger. The EPA was determining
policy, even making it, riffing wildly on legislation with the pre-
sumption that courts will always and everywhere defer to the agency
over industry and even over the words of the legislation. The court
said no: it was the EPA that had been operating illegally all along.
This decision is so startling because it shows a Supreme Court
doing what it is supposed to do, serving as a legal check on the power
ambitions of government itself. That’s what the framers intended. We
have just begun, however. The Court needs to attack the whole machi-
nery of the deep state at its very root, going after “Chevron defer-
ence(1984), the Public Health Services Act (1944), the Federal Reserve
Act(1913), and stretching all the way back to the Pendleton Act(1883)
A nation ruled by a faceless deep state is not a representative demo-
cracy and it is not consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
When you consider the implications of this one decision, they are
awesome. It doesn’t just apply to the EPA and its elaborate plans for
changing the global climate through command and control. It also app-
lies to every other agency, including the CDC and even the Federal
Reserve itself. They all should be accountable to the people through
their elected representatives. If we cannot get back to that system,
we will lose everything.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
We have to pray that the SCOTUS and God hold strong until we the
people can regain control through faith and morals.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 