The Supreme Court Is Demonstrating What It Means to “Deconstruct the Administrative State”
Back when Donald Trump was running for president, his close adviser Steve Bannon pronounced his — and through him, Trump’s — agenda to “deconstruct the administrative state.”
Most people probably had no idea what he was talking about.
Those who get their “news” from right-wing hate media defended it regardless.
The billionaire-owned corporate media glossed over it because those benefiting from the deconstruction’s deregulation were perfectly fine with the resulting tax cuts.
We saw what happened.
For four years, Donald Trump sought to weaken NATO, undermine the United Nations, further massively cut taxes on the morbidly rich economic royalists, eliminate environmental standards, and take a blowtorch to federal regulations intended to make us healthier, better educated, and safer.
The obsequious republican party waited 40 years for someone like Trump to come along so it could step out of the cloakroom into the daylight to destroy democracy right in front of us.
What did Bannon mean?
Look no further than most of the United States Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) latest decisions the past two weeks.
This is exactly what “deconstructing the administrative state” looks like.
Last Tuesday, the right-wing majority on the nation’s highest court blew a hole in the sacrosanct separation of church and state by decreeing the state of Maine is obligated to fund religious education.
Religious groups can now open their own exclusive education institutions without needing to rely on tuition to fund them.
The public will now pay for them.
Then the SCOTUS ruled unconstitutional a New York law on the books since 1913 requiring residents to secure permits to bear arms in public, rendering states unable to enforce firearm safety regulations.
Of course, then SCOTUS overturned 50 years of “settled law” when it overturned Roe vs. Wade, for the first time in history revoking rights instead of granting them.
Justice Clarence Thomas indicated SCOTUS will not stop there.
And indeed it hasn’t.
Compounding last week’s decision to remove the firewall between church and state, the nation’s un-elected monarchs ruled that prayer in school cannot be prevented, further eroding the secular enclaves America’s public schools have always been.
These are not a “states’ rights” canards.
They are part of deliberate, well-funded coordination between Washington and so-called “Christian” dark money groups and wealthy donors to chip away and ultimately eliminate public education funding and push back against any chance at common-sense gun legislation.
But there’s more.
This Thursday, the almighty right-wing majority on the nation’s highest court demonstrated its medieval fealty to corporate donors by decreeing that government agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specifically, cannot pass regulations pertaining to “major questions” if Congress does not pass legislation authorizing those specific regulations.
The particular case takes aim at the Obama administration-era Clean Power Plan, designed to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The plan was never put into effect, though, and the Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless since the Clean Power Plan was abandoned and is unlikely to be re-introduced.
Even though the regulations outlined in the plan don’t exist, the Supreme Court sided with coal mining central West Virginia, which argued “un-elected bureaucrats” at the EPA should be prohibited from limiting pollution, regardless of the fact that coal plant emissions exacerbate flooding, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, food shortages, disease, and overall economic instability.
Basically this means six of America’s monarchs feel that if Congress does not pass legislation on every regulatory agency’s enforcement rules, those rules are unenforceable.
Congress would have to pass individual laws requiring seat belts, bike helmets, littering, public health, bank fees, workplace safety, nuclear waste, and, naturally, how much filth corporate polluters are permitted to spew into the air and water supplies.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion:
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day’. But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rebutted:
“First, members of Congress often don’t know enough-and know they don’t know enough-to regulate sensibly on an issue. Of course, members can and do provide overall direction. But then they rely, as all of us rely in our daily lives, on people with greater expertise and experience. Those people are found in agencies.”
The Biden administration has vowed to slash emissions in half by 2030.
But with a Senate filibuster requiring 60 votes to pass legislation and the fossil fuel industry wholly owning the entire republican caucus and West Va. Democrat Joe Manchin, passing anything resembling substantive environmental policy now appears futile — thanks to six of America’s unelected monarchs.
And why not?
The cancer at the core of our democracy is money.
A series of Supreme Court decisions over the past fifty years have legalized political bribery, which seems to have metastasized out of Congress into the Court itself now.
Money, particularly dark money, in politics has created the conditions for the rot to set in, and all that’s left is for it to spread until the house collapses.
Be on the look out for the next draconian SCOTUS fiat — whether the U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures near-total autonomy to establish federal election laws, including district maps, regardless of state constitutions’ limits on abuses like gerrymandering.
It’s beginning to look more like a strongman oligarchy every day.
Originally published at https://theleftplace.substack.com on July 2, 2022.
