The Left is constantly warning us about the dangers of losing our democracy. They were convinced The Orange Man (Donald Trump) was going to steal our democracy for four years and if elected again will finally complete his goal of becoming a strongman autocrat. One major publication changed its tagline to say that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” while keeping people in the dark. As usual this is just a head fake as they have little interest in the process of democracy in our country.
The Left has used the courts to affect major legislation they could not pass through the democratic process (you remember, elected legislators voting on bills and the executive branch officer signing it into law). The most obvious cases are the Roe V. Wade and the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage. That is just a smidgeon of what is done regularly as we have seen ever-burgeoning bureaucracy making non-democratically initiated rules that we must obey or face significant fines or jail time.
Their arguments are exemplified by the NYT column from October 3rd by Jamelle Bouie https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/opinion/biden-trump-election-democracy.html. He starts with telling us of President Biden arguing MAGA Republicans want to destroy democracy by electing people through the democratic process. Then he goes on to state the Left’s three bogeymen of our constitutional process. First, the electoral college; second, the fact that states have two U.S. Senators each; and third, that it is damn hard to amend our Constitution. They want to eliminate the very factors that have made us a stable country for 250 years. Mr. Bouie forgets we are a republic and not a direct democracy and thank God for that.
Benjamin Franklin was asked on September 17, 1787, what form of government they had formed in the Constitutional Convention. He stated, “A republic, if you can keep it.” He was referring to many on the Left today who 237 years later want to destroy the longest standing representative government in world history.
A much smarter person than I addressed this very issue recently. George Will stated, “Here they lose interest because checks and balances are merely their “formal argument.” What really motivates them is fear of what the Right might do. “They basically say, look, our tribe prefers that the administrative state and the judicial bureaucracy have more power than the elected government because they advance our interests more than the elected government does.”
That leaves us with the biggest challenge to the Left’s control of our lives in current times. In 1984, Chevron v NRDC was decided. It may be the worst court decision since Dred Scott. In short, the decision gave unelected bureaucrats far-reaching power to interpret or more clearly state what they envision is the intent of omnibus legislation written by Congress. If the Administrative State made up of the alphabet soup of governmental agencies — many of which are unknown to the American public — decides that the intent of a law gives the agency the right to control an unintended aspect of our lives, we must either live with their distorted perception or sue them with our funds while they use public monies to defend against us. A sizable portion of the massive growth of the federal government is attributable to this twisted court decision.
Forty years later, the Supreme Court is reviewing this ruling through Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The essence of this case is to eliminate the deference to agency interpretations granted in the Chevron case.
The NYT recently ran a column by Kate Shaw https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/blockbuster-supreme-court-administrative.html The Left is beside itself as defined in this column by Ms. Shaw. Her pitch perfect resume for defending the Left’s desire to maintain control of our lives through the unelected employees at various agencies doing her bidding without duly elected officials having a say. As she states in the column, “If embraced in its entirety, the nondelegation doctrine could spell the end of agency power as we know it, turning the clock back to before the New Deal.” Otherwise, Neanderthals will rule our country rather than the brilliant, selfless government apparatchiks who do now. God forbid the Congress might actually pass the laws; you know those unruly elected officials.
Ms. Shaw crystallizes the arguments made that are so well explained by Mr. Will above. The Democrats want to control Congress to keep the Republicans from stopping the agencies from doing the Democrats’ handiwork. The Dems feed on disarray in Congress. The exalted Nancy Pelosi mastered budgeting by perpetual Continuing Resolutions (CR) and writing omnibus bills in the backrooms of her office. She gave her own delegation little chance to debate what was in the bills or even to read them before they hit the floor for a vote.
All that was to give all the power to the agencies, stuffed with Democrat operatives, to make the day-to-day operational decisions on these 1,000-page bills.
Usually when someone spends massive amounts of time harping on a subject it is so they can do just the opposite in the dark. Yes, Democracy Dies in the Darkness of Democrats and their unelected agencies and legal interpretation. They have no interest in democracy, but hopefully that will come to an end next June.
