Reining In the Fourth Branch of Government

The Constitution provides for three branches of government, sharing sovereign power. In fact, we have a fourth branch, the sprawling administrative bureaucracies....

Last week’s Supreme Court decision took an important step to rein in these bureaucracies. It ruled the regulations for carbon dioxide emissions, written and enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, went well beyond the vague laws passed by Congress....

...  the courts are finally trying to constrain Washington’s vast, centralized “regulatory state,” which they see as fundamentally undemocratic and a threat to our constitutionally guaranteed liberties and our right to govern ourselves through elected representatives.

This debate goes to the very heart of how we as Americans rule ourselves. The left sees Washington’s administrative apparatus as “rule by experts,” essential for controlling a technologically complex society....

Conservatives see the metastasizing administrative state as violating two fundamental precepts of the Constitution. First, Washington bureaucracies have effectively become an unelected – and poorly controlled – fourth branch of government. Second, their centralized power has slowly, inexorably crushed the federal structure of the Constitution, which leaves most lawmaking to the states....

The left welcomes this transformation, which it rightly sees as the culmination of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive vision. He openly sought to replace the “Founders’ Constitution,” which he considered antiquated, with a modern “Living Constitution,”...

The court’s ruling produced a bizarre spectacle on Capitol Hill: Democratic senators and representatives saying, “Please don’t return that authority to us.” Why? Because they want to avoid responsibility for the laws they pass (or fail to pass). They’ve been shirking that responsibility for decades, weakening their own powers, and they want to continue....