The Dangerous Rise Of The Fourth Branch Of Government, The Administrative State
The unchecked and ever-growing bureaucracy in this country is a danger to our freedoms, writes law professor Jonathan Turley in the WaPo:
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress's lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of "laws" governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It's often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill's relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state -- like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.
...As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.
These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.
...In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government's priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding. We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.
If you still have faith that government will protect you, please try to understand that it is very much misplaced.
This is a reason for ridiculous expenses by Federal contractors, too. I can't get large-format printers repaired, because the regulations actually require a subcontractor visiting the site to go through hours of training; the maintenance request forms actually ask if work will occur within 15 feet of a high-voltage power line, etc. So a $9000 printer goes to scrap because its logic board has a bad cap on it.
The Web shows me a dozen vendors who could be here in an hour, otherwise.
Irony: after being told by one of the agents whose job it is to get service work done that the printer was old, and it was likely that something else would break, the one she ordered failed immediately.
Radwaste at May 26, 2013 9:14 AM
The narrative of "why do you hate our planet" was one of the great propaganda campaigns of history. My awakening started 20 years ago when I saw the raw Gaiainic propaganda pervading preschool TV. It was far from new; I just hadn't noticed earlier.
Enormous power has now been moved beyond the reach of voters lulled from birth by this drek. In charity, I should welcome Turley to the ranks of the objectors. It's just that he's 30 or 40 years late.
(TV left our house for 10 years while our kids developed their own memetic immune systems. Worked out pretty well.)
phunctor at May 26, 2013 9:30 AM
"It's just that he's 30 or 40 years late."
Powerline had that same cry, but I think they are barking up the wrong tree and trying to claim something as their own which isn't.
Turley is neither left nor right. He may be more liberal than you on some issues, and today he may agree with your conservative position, but in the many years I've read him, he is predictably one thing only and that's a civil libertarian first and foremost.
The position he takes in this column as in all his columns is solidly explained by his civil libertarian positions. (*)
(*) his links to reddit for pictures of various idiots or animals excepted.
jerry at May 26, 2013 11:47 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2013/05/26/the_dangerous_r.html#comment-3721551">comment from jerryI disagree with him on some of his positions -- just not his civil libertarian ones.
Amy Alkon
at May 26, 2013 12:38 PM
In other news Jonathan Turley will soon be investigated on charges of sedition
lujlp at May 26, 2013 12:50 PM
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