Reining in the Administrative State

Reining in the Administrative State
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Abuse of administrative power
ISBN:

Reining in the Administrative State

Reining in the Administrative State
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Abuse of administrative power
ISBN:

You Report to Me

You Report to Me
Author: David Bernhardt
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1641773316

Only a short while ago, it was unimaginable that our nation would face a baby formula shortage facilitated by a bureaucratic delay, or witness the national massive embarrassment of flawed military and diplomatic action, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet, our leaders and our federal agencies consistently fail the American people, despite the massive growth of these institutions. When David Bernhardt became Secretary of the Interior in the Trump Administration, he witnessed the full dysfunction of our federal agencies and learned that America's sprawling civil service was often unresponsive to the will of the nation’s chief executive. In fact, agency staff aligned with the ideology of one political party often worked to actively "resist" the other. Meanwhile, our elected officials in Congress happily punted significant questions of public policy to those unaccountable agencies. In You Report to Me, Bernhardt provides a firsthand chronicle of how the bureaucratic swamp really works and reveals how unaccountable power has quietly concentrated in the administrative state over the last two decades. Drawing on his experiences working under two administrations, Bernhardt details how President Trump's enabling leadership revealed a path for curtailing the administrative state in the future. You Report to Me calls on America's leaders to turn off autopilot and retake control of this ever-multiplying, unaccountable federal bureaucracy before it completely destroys the Founders' vision of a government based on the consent of the governed.

Bureaucracy in America

Bureaucracy in America
Author: Joseph Postell
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2017-07-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0826273785

The rise of the administrative state is the most significant political development in American politics over the past century. While our Constitution separates powers into three branches, and requires that the laws are made by elected representatives in the Congress, today most policies are made by unelected officials in agencies where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are combined. This threatens constitutionalism and the rule of law. This book examines the history of administrative power in America and argues that modern administrative law has failed to protect the principles of American constitutionalism as effectively as earlier approaches to regulation and administration.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
Author: Philip Hamburger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022611645X

“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

Judicializing the Administrative State

Judicializing the Administrative State
Author: Hiroshi Okayama
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2019-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351393332

A basic feature of the modern US administrative state taken for granted by legal scholars but neglected by political scientists and historians is its strong judiciality. Formal, or court-like, adjudication was the primary method of first-order agency policy making during the first half of the twentieth century. Even today, most US administrative agencies hire administrative law judges and other adjudicators conducting hearings using formal procedures autonomously from the agency head. No other industrialized democracy has even come close to experiencing the systematic state judicialization that took place in the United States. Why did the American administrative state become highly judicialized, rather than developing a more efficiency-oriented Weberian bureaucracy? Legal scholars argue that lawyers as a profession imposed the judicial procedures they were the most familiar with on agencies. But this explanation fails to show why the judicialization took place only in the United States at the time it did. Okayama demonstrates that the American institutional combination of common law and the presidential system favored policy implementation through formal procedures by autonomous agencies and that it induced the creation and development of independent regulatory commissions explicitly modeled after courts from the late nineteenth century. These commissions judicialized the state not only through their proliferation but also through the diffusion of their formal procedures to executive agencies over the next half century, which led to a highly fairness-oriented administrative state.

Law and Leviathan

Law and Leviathan
Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674247531

From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

The Chevron Doctrine

The Chevron Doctrine
Author: Thomas W. Merrill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674276388

“Wise and illuminating...Merrill’s treatment of the rise of Chevron, and its various twists and turns over the decades, is keenly insightful.” —Cass R. Sunstein, New York Review of Books “Merrill is one of the brightest and best scholars of administrative law in his generation. This book...is must-reading for any citizen who has an interest in the constitutionality of the administrative state.” —Steven G. Calabresi, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law “A model of how to conduct rigorous, level-headed, and fair-minded analysis of a subject that has generated enormous legal controversy. There is no more judicious mind among American legal scholars than Thomas Merrill’s.”—Nicholas Parrillo, Yale Law School “A must-read for practicing or prospective administrative lawyers. They, as well as a broader audience, will find much good sense in the author’s judicious treatment of perennial questions of lawful government.”—Michael S. Greve, Claremont Review of Books The Constitution makes Congress the principal federal lawmaker. But for a variety of reasons, including partisan gridlock, Congress increasingly fails to keep up with the challenges facing our society. Power has shifted to the executive branch agencies that interpret laws and to the courts that review their interpretations. Since the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, this judicial review has been highly deferential: courts must uphold agency interpretations of unclear laws so long as these are “reasonable.” But the Chevron doctrine faces backlash from constitutional scholars and, now, from Supreme Court justices who insist that courts, not administrative agencies, have the authority to say what the law is. Critics of the administrative state charge that Chevron deference enables unaccountable bureaucratic power. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Merrill reviews the history and consequences of the Chevron doctrine and suggests a way forward.

The Administrative Threat

The Administrative Threat
Author: Philip Hamburger
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 159403950X

Government agencies regulate Americans in the full range of their lives, including their political participation, their economic endeavors, and their personal conduct. Administrative power has thus become pervasively intrusive. But is this power constitutional? A similar sort of power was once used by English kings, and this book shows that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, administrative power revives absolutism. On this foundation, the book explains how administrative power denies Americans their basic constitutional freedoms, such as jury rights and due process. No other feature of American government violates as many constitutional provisions or is more profoundly threatening. As a result, administrative power is the key civil liberties issue of our era.

Accommodating the Administrative State

Accommodating the Administrative State
Author: Patrick M. Garry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 39
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

Accommodating the Administrative State: The Interrelationship Between the Chevron and Nondelegation Doctrines addresses the interrelationship between two of the more prominent doctrines in administrative law - the nondelegation doctrine and the Chevron doctrine. The article argues that even though the Chevron doctrine has come under intense criticism, it is the logical result of how the nondelegation doctrine has evolved since the late 1930s.During the constitutional revolution of the New Deal, the Court adopted a deferential model of the nondelegation doctrine, enabling Congress to delegate broad regulatory powers to administrative agencies. This deferential model has become so accepted by the courts that not once since the New Deal has the nondelegation doctrine been used to strike down a congressional enactment. The Chevron doctrine, however, has not been so universally accepted. This doctrine contradicts traditional legal principles by giving to administrative agencies the power to interpret the statutes they administer, hence requiring courts to defer to agencies on questions of law. Many critics argue that Chevron violates separation of powers, since it gives to the executive branch a power traditionally exercised by the judiciary. Contrary to this position, the article argues that Chevron is a necessary and logical extension of the generally accepted nondelegation doctrine. In essence, both doctrines have become necessary to support and sustain the modern administrative state.