I & I Editorial BoardThe left, to no one’s surprise, is freaking out about the Supreme Court’s ruling that a president can fire an official who works in the executive branch. They are freaking out not because the ruling favors President Donald Trump, but because it will return the federal government to its constitutional roots.
Liberal Justices on the court spoke for the freak-out crowd when they said that the conservative majority in Trump v. Cook “reshapes our government,” and that “dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent.
Scary sounding, right?
But look closely at the term “independent commissions.”
You might think the government is comprised of three branches: the executive, legislative, and judicial. And sure enough, that’s what the Constitution says, while making no mention of a fourth branch called “independent commissions.”
Yet Congress kept creating these independent agencies to enforce laws that lawmakers only sketched out. And then they decided that these agencies needed protection from the executive branch to keep them free of petty politics.
The result, however, has been to unleash an army of unelected bureaucrats who hold tremendous power over the nation and whose decisions, thanks to misguided court rulings, are almost impossible to challenge.
That was the reshaping of government, and it’s one that the left has used for decades to thwart the will of the people.
As the legendary journalist M. Stanton Evans explained way back in 1985 in an essay called “Steering the Elephant,” this “permanent, self-enclosed system operates on its own terms, toward its own ends, according to its own law. … From its perspective, elections are an inconvenience, a distraction that must be dealt with before the people who really run things can get to the business of governing.”
Trump called it the swamp. Others have called it the “administrative state.” But whatever name it’s given, it was not what the Founders had envisioned 250 years ago.
The Supreme Court gave this misbegotten fourth branch its stamp of approval in 1935, when it ruled – in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. the United States – that FDR couldn’t fire a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission who was blocking his agenda.
As we noted in this space when the Trump v. Cook case was argued before the Supreme Court (see “Yes, Supreme Court, Please ‘Destroy The Structure Of Government’“):
After the (1935) ruling, ‘independent agencies’ flourished – there are at least 19 of them now – moving the country inexorably toward the leftist vision of a powerful central government run by unaccountable ‘experts’ liberated from the whims of voters.
Trump, to his credit, decided to confront this problem head-on and force the issue before the Supreme Court. And the result was that, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
You’d think that people who are constantly fretting about “threats to democracy” would be cheering this decision.
But alas, that concern is a façade. The left supports democracy only when it’s convenient to its cause. Their reaction to the court’s latest ruling is proof enough of that.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Editor’s note: This editorial was updated to include the name of the justice who wrote the dissent quoted.
Who is the “She” in “She wrote”??
Our apologies for not including the justice’s name. It was Justice Sonia Sotomayor who wrote that dissent. The piece has been updated.