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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
The Supreme Court Gives Back to Congress the Power It Gave to Executive Branch Lawmaking Many Years Ago
The Supreme Court Gives Back to Congress the Power It Gave to Executive Branch Lawmaking Many Years Ago
Paul Craig Roberts.
Prior to the 1930s “New Deal” regulatory agencies, Congress controlled the law. A statute mean what Congress said. Thereafter, a statute meant whatever the regulatory agency said it meant. For example, I have explained in my columns many times and in my book, The New Color Line, that the EEOC used the 1964 Civil Rights Act which explicitly prohibited racial quotas to impose racial quotas. From the 1930s forward a “law” passed by Congress was nothing but an authorization for a regulatory authority to define the law by how it wrote the regulations governing its meaning and enforcement.
Having watched the power of Congress reduced to nothing, its own in question, and the enormous power now concentrated in the executive branch, the Supreme Court has made an effort to restore a balance of power between the three branches of government. This is an important development. Possibly it will save us from tyranny.
In overturning the Chevron ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that judges must interpret the statutory intent of Congress in passing a statute and not simply defer to regulatory agencies’ interpretations of the statute.
The independence of executive branch regulatory agencies had gone so far that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was making in-house, that is within the agency, decisions on civil penalties. The Supreme Court ruled that penalties require jury trials, and that the SEC is not prosecutor, judge, and jury.
Justice Gorsuch said that the Supreme Court’s decision takes law out of the hands of the federal branch and places it again where it belongs in the courts’ reading of the legislature’s intent.
The liberal incompetents that Democrats have placed on the Court refused to defend the Supreme Court’s assertion of its authority over law.
There is no question that if the Democrats succeed in their coup against America and the Constitution, those who live in the US will live in a worst dystopia than those imagined by writers of dystopia novels.