This piece has been excerpted from testimony before the Executive Overreach Task Force for the House Judiciary Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee.
“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this,” Madison writes in Federalist 51, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
That meant that, in addition to performing its proper constitutional functions, there needed to be an internal check to further limit the powers of government. For that purpose, the Founders not only divided power, but also set it against itself.
This separation of powers is the defining structural mechanism of the Constitution. It divides the powers of government among three branches and vests each with independent powers and responsibilities.
“The accumulation of all powers,” Madison notes in Federalist 47, “legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Thus, for “the preservation of liberty,” each branch has only those powers granted to it, and can do only what its particular grant of power authorizes it to do.
“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this,” Madison writes in Federalist 51, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
That meant that, in addition to performing its proper constitutional functions, there needed to be an internal check to further limit the powers of government. For that purpose, the Founders not only divided power, but also set it against itself.
This separation of powers is the defining structural mechanism of the Constitution. It divides the powers of government among three branches and vests each with independent powers and responsibilities.
“The accumulation of all powers,” Madison notes in Federalist 47, “legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Thus, for “the preservation of liberty,” each branch has only those powers granted to it, and can do only what its particular grant of power authorizes it to do.
...The U.S. has been moving down the path of administrative government in fits and starts from the initial Progressive Era reforms through the New Deal’s interventions in the economy. But the most significant expansion occurred more recently, under the Great Society and its progeny.
The expansion of regulatory activities on a society-wide scale in the 1960s and 1970s led to vast new centralizing authority in the federal government and a vast expansion of federal regulatory authority.
When administration is nationalized, though, it does not easily or naturally fall under the authority of one branch or another. As we’ve seen, bureaucracy and its control created a new source of conflict between the executive and legislative branches.
During the first part of our bureaucratic history, Congress had the upper hand. Congress, after all, had been creating these regulatory agencies to carry out its wishes and delegating its legislative powers to them in the form of broad regulatory authority.
Congress was the first to adapt to the administrative state, continuously reorganizing itself since 1970 by committees and subcommittees to oversee and interact with the day-to-day operations of the bureaucratic apparatus as it expanded.
Rather than control or diminish the bureaucracy through lawmaking or budget control, Congress has settled mostly on “oversight” of the bureaucracy.
Today, when Congress writes legislation, it uses very broad language that turns extensive power over to agencies, which are also given the authority of executing and usually adjudicating violations of their regulations in particular cases. The result is that most of the actual decisions of lawmaking and public policy — decisions previously the constitutional responsibility of elected legislators — are delegated to bureaucrats whose “rules” have the full force and effect of laws.
In 2014, about 220 pieces of legislation became law, amounting to a little more than 3,000 pages of law, while federal bureaucrats issued 79,066 pages of new and updated regulations. The modern Congress is almost exclusively a supervisory body exercising post-legislative oversight of administrative policymakers...
And therein lays most of the problems we face
1 comment:
The separation of powers is broken.
The Executive branch acts as a dictator and not an executive administrating to the laws passed by the Legislative branch.
The Judicial branch walks all over the Legislative branch by constantly legislating from the bench; ruling by case law precedents, mutating away progressively each time from any original statutes intent and rights. Even when the statute is put before them on a silver platter it's ignored. Lawyers and judges making grand speeches that espouse the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, say they respect the laws passed by the legislatures, and then do the opposite.
The Legislative branch acquiesces their duty, passive and powerless to the other two branches that walk all over them.
Total absolute corruption.
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