Supreme Court: ‘Deep State’ Unconstitutional
In the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case decided on June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court held 6-3 that executive branch agencies may no longer interpret their own application of a law. It struck down the “Chevron deference” doctrine, a 1984 Supreme Court decision that allowed executive agencies to interpret ambiguities in their own statutes and to demand that courts defer to those interpretations. This new ruling decreases the power of executive agencies and returns power to the legislature and the courts, and may increase the power of the presidency over the rest of the executive branch. It is an enormous step toward dismantling the so-called deep state that has taken over the nation.
Under the Constitution, Congress makes laws (Article 1), the president enforces them (Article 2), federal courts judge the application of federal laws to specific cases (Article 3). Most powers are reserved to the states (Article 4) or to the individual citizen (Amendments 1-10). Yet the federal government now dominates the states, the executive branch dominates the federal government, and bureaucratic agencies dominate the executive branch, including, to a large degree, the presidency.
This bureaucratic state is nowhere sanctioned in the Constitution, yet it has amassed legislative, executive and judicial powers within itself and exerts more control over U.S. citizens than the other three branches.
“The deep state is, in fact, a very real thing,” geopolitical forecaster George Friedman wrote in 2017. “This entity is called the civil service, and it was created to limit the power of the president. Prior to 1871, the president could select federal employees. … Carl Schurz, a German-born Union Army general, proposed the idea of a nonpolitical civil service.”
Schurz’s plan was meant to create a professional civil service and limit political favoritism, yet it ended up creating an entire fourth branch of government that was neither elected by the people nor accountable to them. Progressive presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt dramatically increased the size of the civil service even as Congress continued to delegate more regulatory authority to these bureaucracies.
Government records show that since 1976, the people’s elected representatives in Congress have passed 12,340 laws. Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service, Environmental Protection Agency and other executive departments and agencies have issued 215,405 rules and regulations. For every law passed by elected representatives, unelected bureaucrats add 17 regulations. The U.S. has evolved away from a constitutional republic into a technocracy run by bureaucrats and intelligence agents.
This is what makes the Loper ruling so significant. If and when implemented, it will help force the bureaucratic state back into its constitutional place: enforcing laws passed by Congress. The ruling does not completely dismantle America’s fourth branch of government. Yet it does mean that executive agencies now have to prove Congress gave them authority to make a particular ruling, rather than expecting that the court system will automatically defer to their micromanagement of the nation. It moves the nation back toward the original constitutional model where elected representatives of the people in Congress make laws, judges appointed by elected officials determine their application in specific disputes, and the president enforces them, with full control over those who assist him.
