{"id":33583,"date":"2015-11-14T04:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-14T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33583"},"modified":"2015-11-12T11:20:54","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T16:20:54","slug":"the-us-government-has-morphed-from-being-part-of-us-to-being-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/14\/the-us-government-has-morphed-from-being-part-of-us-to-being-them\/","title":{"rendered":"The US government has morphed from being part of “us” to being “them”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Murray<\/a> explains why so many Americans are feeling alienated from their own government:<\/p>\n

I have been led to this position by what I believe to be a truth about where America stands: The federal government is no longer \u201cus\u201d but \u201cthem.\u201d It is no longer an extension of the people through their elected representatives. It is no longer a republican bulwark against the arbitrary use of power. It has become an entity unto itself, separated from the American people and beyond the effective control of the political process. In this situation, the foundational principles of our nation come into play: The government does not command the blind allegiance of the citizenry. Government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights. The more destructive it becomes of those rights, the less it can call upon our allegiance.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t try to lay out the whole case for concluding that our duty of allegiance has been radically diminished \u2014 that takes a few hundred pages. But let me summarize the ways in which the federal government has not simply become bigger and more intrusive since Bill Buckley founded National Review<\/em>, but has also become \u201cthem,\u201d and no longer an extension of \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In 1937, Helvering v. Davis<\/em> explicitly held that the federal government could spend money on the \u201cgeneral welfare,\u201d establishing that the government\u2019s powers were not limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. In 1938, Carolene Products<\/em> did what the Ninth Amendment had been intended to prevent \u2014 it limited the rights of the American people to those that were explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and its amendments. Making matters worse, the Court also limited the circumstances under which it would protect even those explicitly named rights. In 1942, Wickard v. Filburn<\/em> completed the reinterpretation of \u201ccommerce\u201d so that the commerce clause became, in the words of federal judge Alex Kozinski, the \u201cHey, you can do anything you feel like\u201d clause.<\/p>\n

Momentous as these decisions were, they were arguably not as crucial to the evolution of the federal government from \u201cus\u201d to \u201cthem\u201d as the decisions that led to the regulatory state. Until the 1930s, a body of jurisprudence known as the \u201cnondelegation doctrine\u201d had put strict limits on how much power Congress could delegate to the executive branch. The agencies of the executive branch obviously had to be given some latitude to interpret the text of legislation, but Congress was required to specify an \u201cintelligible principle\u201d whenever it passed a law that gave the executive branch a new task. In 1943, National Broadcasting Co. v. United States<\/em> dispensed with that requirement, holding that it was okay for Congress to tell the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to write regulations for allocating radio licenses \u201cas public convenience, interest, or necessity requires\u201d \u2014 an undefined, and hence unintelligible, principle. And so we now live in a world in which Congress passes laws with grandiose goals, loosely defined, and delegates responsibility for interpreting those goals exclusively to regulatory agencies that have no accountability to the citizenry and only limited accountability to the president of the United States.<\/p>\n

The de facto<\/em> legislative power delegated to regulatory agencies is only one aspect of their illegitimacy. Citizens who have not been hit with an accusation of a violation may not realize how Orwellian the regulatory state has become. If you run afoul of an agency such as the FCC and want to defend yourself, you don\u2019t go to a regular court. You go to an administrative court run by the agency. You don\u2019t get a jury. The case is decided by an administrative judge who is an employee of the agency. You do not need to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather by the loosest of all legal standards, a preponderance of the evidence. The regulatory agency is also free of many of the rules that constrain police and prosecutors in the normal legal system. For example, regulatory agencies are not required to show probable cause for getting a search warrant. A regulatory agency can inspect a property or place of business under broad conditions that it has set for itself.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much more, but it amounts to this: Regulatory agencies, or the regulatory divisions within cabinet agencies, operate as self-contained entities that create de facto<\/em> laws that Congress would never have passed on an up-or-down vote. They then act as both police and judge in enforcing the laws they have created. It amounts to an extra-legal state within the state.<\/p>\n

I have focused on the regulatory state because it now looms so large in daily life as to have provoked a reaction that crosses political divides: American government isn\u2019t supposed to work this way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Murray explains why so many Americans are feeling alienated from their own government: I have been led to this position by what I believe to be a truth about where America stands: The federal government is no longer \u201cus\u201d but \u201cthem.\u201d It is no longer an extension of the people through their elected representatives. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,7,10,13],"tags":[715,267,661,217,752],"class_list":["post-33583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-constitution","tag-justice","tag-regulation","tag-rights","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8JF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33584,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33583\/revisions\/33584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}