Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 1 - October 23, 2023
Most recently and grievously, in the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision on June 28, 2012, in National Federation of Independent Business et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. (aka the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare case), the Court issued the most unscrupulous of modern judicial rulings, in which it not only distorted the federal government’s taxing power beyond all recognition, but also used that power to alter fundamentally the relationship between the individual and the federal government.
Obamacare relies heavily on the IRS to enforce key provisions of the law. In addition to hiring thousands of new staffers, including auditors, a recent Treasury Department Inspector General report discloses that the IRS has created several committees, offices, and teams to implement and oversee Obamacare:
The proposed Tax Amendment would set a ceiling for income earners at 15 percent. It provides a degree of flexibility by allowing Congress to institute a flat tax lower than 15 percent or additional income-based tax rates below the 15 percent cap.
The proposed Tax Amendment eliminates all forms of double taxation, including the so-called inheritance or death tax (a tax on estates often passed from parents and grandparents to their off-spring); taxes on investment income (which promotes wealth creation and economic growth); and taxes on corporations (which reduce research, capital expansion, and job creation). In most cases, these taxes have been layered upon income taxes already paid by individuals.
Linking the two events of tax-paying and voting, in a way and at a time when the voter’s attention is most concentrated, is intended to improve political and governing accountability.
The Framers’ expectation that federal spending and taxes would be limited to support only explicitly constitutional functions—to “pay debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare”—has been distorted deliberately as part of the Statists’ design. It is folly to believe that Congress and the president, on their own, will make the necessary and difficult decisions to address the impending financial debacle. After all, they and their predecessors engineered the approaching tsunami. As the situation becomes direr, the federal government’s actions will grow more oppressive.
The Constitution, through an arrangement of separate but coequal branches, checks and balances, enumerated powers, federalism, and a bill of rights, diffuses power. This construct was intended to prevent the overcentralization and concentration of power in the federal government and was fundamental to preserving the nature of republican government.
“When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. . . . ”9
As Madison explained in Federalist 51: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. . . . It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. . . .
Woodrow Wilson against checks and balances
In the 1930s and 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, in which Congress passed laws creating federal agencies and delegating power to them to regulate vast segments of the economy and daily life, in many instances bypassing or supplanting state lawmaking authority.
However, the Court would soon reverse course and abandon its own precedent after Roosevelt threatened to change the Court’s makeup. Over time, he did in fact replace the sitting justices with men who shared his ideological views.
1937 Jones v. Laughlin Steel Corp case, the Court held that “intrastate activities that ‘have a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions’ are within Congress’ power to regulate”;16 later, in the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision, it went much further, ruling that withholding goods from interstate commerce affects interstate commerce and therefore such activity is subject to congressional lawmaking power.
More to the justification of the proposed amendment, the vastness of the federal bureaucracy—that is, an administrative state or what has become a fourth branch of government—destroys the very idea of a representative legislature and does severe damage to the separation-of-powers doctrine. Departments and agencies created by Congress are attached to the executive branch and exercise lawmaking power that is both delegated and not delegated by Congress. And their myriad regulations and rules have the force of law, including criminal and civil penalties. Under present conditions, the
...more
Ironically, judicial review, which is exercised vigorously and expansively by the Courts, is all but nonexistent in matters involving congressional delegations to administrative agencies. They mostly defer to the discretion of Congress and, with few exceptions, uphold administrative actions to the extent they consider them seriously at all.
2007 case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, by a 5 to 4 vote the Court actually expanded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, despite the agency’s long-held determination that these gases are not pollutants subject to regulation. The Court opened the door to an infinite number of agency regulations affecting an endless line of industries, products, and processes.
annual regulatory compliance costs amounted to $1.752 trillion.20 In 2012, the Obama administration issued new regulations costing $236 billion. New EPA regulations alone resulted in $172 billion in regulatory costs.21 The 2012 Federal Register, the official federal publication documenting administrative rules and proposed rules, exceeded 77,000 pages. The 2011 and 2010 Federal Registers were 81,247 and 81,405 pages long, respectively. In 2011, regulatory agencies issued 3,807 final rules, yet Congress passed and the president signed 81 laws.22 In 2012, the bureaucracy reportedly issued 212
...more
“[s]cores of federal departments and agencies have created so many criminal offenses that the Congressional Research Office (CRS) [an arm of Congress] . . . admitted that it was unable to even count all the offenses. The Service’s best estimate? ‘Tens of thousands.’ . . . Congress’s own experts do not have a clear understanding of the size and scope of federal criminalization.”
President Barack Obama has declared repeatedly, including in his 2013 State of the Union speech, that “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will”—threatening to legislate by executive branch regulation in lieu of congressional action.
To shed some light on the process, it is worth a brief primer on administrative law—in
Once Congress grants such regulatory authority, the agency has discretion to achieve the stated goal.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides that Congress may review these regulations and, if a joint resolution susceptible to a presidential veto passes, the regulation can be overruled.27 Since 1996, Congress has disapproved only a single rule. Clearly, the CRA is not an effective tool for ensuring congressional oversight or curbing regulatory overreach.
