Every Congressman takes an oath to "support the Constitution."
E. Corwin, Constitutional Revolution, Ltd., 13 (1941). See also: Gary Lawson, The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 107, No. 6 (Apr., 1994), pp. 1231-1254
JSTOR
You've probably never heard of "the administrative state." Do a Google search for "administrative state" to begin your study. This is just the tip of the iceberg. |
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Scholars and political scientists will tell you what most people don't know: we no longer live under the Constitution, with its three branches of government. We live under "Administrative Law" in an "Administrative State." James Freedman has called "the administrative state" "a fourth branch of
government,"[1] but it is actually a form of government which Madison, as he wrote in The Federalist, would have called “the very essence of tyranny.”[2]
Rather than calling attention to this tyranny, most congressmen have continued to vote for higher appropriations for this unconstitutional system. Both the Republican and the Democrat parties are completely out of step with the intent of the Founding Fathers and the genius of the American system.
While a few thousand bills are introduced in Congress each term, only a few hundred become law, and this includes things like renaming a post office and giving a medal to Frank Sinatra.
Most of the real lawmaking is done in the bureaucracies. These unconstitutional agencies create ten times more law than Congress -- some 70,000 pages a year in "The Federal Register."
"Congressional oversight" of these bureaucracies is impossible; the size of government -- the "Administrative State" -- is as incomprehensible as it is unconstitutional.
Here is a list of many key federal agencies, departments, boards and commissions. These can be broken down into the following areas:
Special Report: How Congress Can Save America
- Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change. - The Boston Globe
- "Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy."
- The Most Important Academic Article on Liberty I Have Ever Read, Now 25 Years Old and Still Crucial | Gary North
- Harold Berman, Prof of Law at Harvard, wrote Law and Revolution in 1983. The Introduction is the key. Most of it is on-line for free courtesy of Google. There are
some missing pages, but you can understand his thesis with what is on-line.
- Here is his thesis: The Western legal tradition is the result of six revolutions: (1) Papal; (2) Reformation; (3) English (1688); (3) American; (5) French; (6) Russian.
- There is now a seventh: administrative law. This is the main one. It is taking away our liberties. It is universal.
- The USSR is gone. Russian administrative law isn't.
- What is administrative law? Law that is written by the executive and enforced by nearly autonomous executive agencies. The term "administrative law judge" identifies such an official.
- The executive is centralizing control. The legislatures are becoming peripheral. The courts are becoming peripheral.
- He said that this is the greatest threat to liberty today.
- I argue that only one thing can reverse it: de-funding.
The architects of "The Administrative State" despised the Constitution and the principles upon which America was founded. Ronald J. Pestritto writes in a Claremont Institute essay, "Leaving the Constitution,"
[Progressives] understood that the greatest obstacle to it was the Constitution of the United States—especially the separation of powers—and the principles of the Declaration of Independence upon which the Constitution rests. Politics and Administration: A Study in Government [by Frank J. Goodnow (1900)] provided a new vision for America's governing institutions and the arrangement of national power. In subsequent works, such as Social
Reform and the Constitution (1911) and The American Conception of Liberty and Government (1916), Goodnow showed how this new vision arose from a critique of the bedrock ideas of American government. He complained about the "reverence" Americans had for their founding, which he regarded as "superstitious" and an obstacle to genuine political reform. In particular, he held that the focus on government's permanent duty to
protect individual natural rights had impeded the marked expansion of governmental power that Progressives desired. He objected that the founders' principles were "permeated by the theories of social compact and natural right," which he regarded as "worse than useless" since they "retard development."
Goodnow wrote:
The rights which [an individual] possesses are...conferred upon him, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs. What they are is to be determined by the legislative authority in view of the needs of that society. Social expediency, rather than natural right, is thus to determine the sphere of individual freedom of action.
THE LEGAL ORIGINS OF THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE
William J. Novak
National Bureau of Economic Research
Corruption and Reform Planning Meeting
July 14, 2002
Between 1877 and 1937 (between the formal end of Reconstruction and the formal constitutional ratification of the New Deal), the American system of governance was transformed with momentous implications for twentieth-century social and economic life. Nineteenth-century traditions of self-government and local citizenship were replaced by a modern approach to positive statecraft.... This late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolution in
governance is best characterized as “The Creation of the American Liberal State.”
By “The Creation of the American Liberal State” I mean to suggest that the period from 1877 to 1937 was not just an “age of reform” or a “response to industrialism” or a “search for order” (Hofstadter 1955; Hays 1957; Wiebe 1967). Rather, it was an era marked by the specific and unambiguous emergence of a new regime of American governance -- the modern liberal state. Nineteenth-century patterns of social governance and local
economic regulation -- what I have described elsewhere (Novak 1996) as “the well-regulated society” -- were displaced by a decisive twentieth-century reconfiguration of the relationship between state, capitalism, and population in the United States. A central nation-state consolidated around new positive and political conceptions
of sovereignty
and administration radically extended its reach into American economy and society.
Of course, this transformation in American governance and the creation of a modern administrative state in the United States has not escaped the notice of historians, social scientists, and legal scholars.
Whether characterized in A.V. Dicey’s (1914) terms as a shift from individualism to collectivism or in Roscoe Pound’s (1909) notion of a move from negative liberty to positive liberty or in John Dewey’s (1935) ideas about the progression from old to new liberalism, this interpretation emphasizes the great transformation from nineteenth-century
laissez-faire to the twentieth-century general welfare state.
Gary North, Liberty’s Greatest Enemy Today
This is why I do not take politics seriously. The legal revolution of administrative law is the greatest single threat to liberty in the world today, and it is firmly locked into the American social and legal order. People unthinkingly accept it. They are unaware of it. They do not understand the implications
of the Federal Register, which now publishes 80,000 pages of fine print administrative law every year.
Politics is impotent to change this. Politics is unaware of it. Those few laws that get passed by Congress and signed into law by the President are then administered by the federal bureaucracy, and there is almost nothing that a President or Congress can do to stop it. Occasionally, the Supreme Court may hand down
a ruling that will stop some minor aspect of the expansion of the federal bureaucracy, but this is rare.
Darwinism and the Death of the Constitution