The Supreme Court had a busy week. The opinion it issued allowing the government to continue to collude with social media wasn’t great but at least lawmakers have a guideline of how to write legislation so it cannot happen.
The real bomb blasts were the overturning of Chevron, and in the case of the SEC they empowered individuals to be able to fight against the faceless unelected bureaucratic state. Yes, I linked to the leftish SCOTUSblog but smart people will see through the bias in analysis.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Reading from the bench on Thursday, Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “a devastating blow to the manner in which our government functions.”
Unfortunately, the liberal wing of the court doesn’t understand that the devastating blow is a benefit, not a hindrance. It’s supposed to be hard for the government to go after individual citizens. What we had prior to this decision was a politicized bureaucracy that could prey on political opponents or people it didn’t like.
The justices also ruled in favor of the citizens who protested mostly peacefully on January 6th. Merrick Garland’s politicized Department of Justice lost out.
We can speculate about the outcomes of those decisions. However, I think it is just a start to getting America back on the right track. There is still a lot to be done.
America needs to be not only a beacon of freedom but a beacon of innovation. To be a beacon of innovation the country needs lots of personal liberty and that means a much smaller government. Smaller governments also start to chip away at the massive debt we have incurred. Massive debt hinders individuals and entrepreneurs because it is a tax on their future income.
In the early 20th Century Woodrow Wilson and FDR did what they could to expand the role of government influence into American lives. Their actions didn’t make things better. It usurped liberty.
In the 1960s, it got worse with LBJ. The War on Poverty was and is an utter failure. Robert F. Kennedy was a big proponent of it as well.
I love watching people like Garry Tan wake up to the fact that when the government allocates and spends money, little gets done. He tweets:
In 2021, Congress spent $7.5B for a 500K EV charging stations. Three years later, only 8 built. We spent $50B to jumpstart chip fabs. Result? TSMC’s fab in Arizona got pushed back to 2028. $42.5B to bring internet to rural America. Three years, no results
I am reminded of “We are from the government and we are here to help.” The worst words you can hear according to Ronald Reagan.
Welcome to the party Garry. We have watched places like San Francisco destroy themselves since the mid-1990s. I am happy you are seeing it and now you will have a very hard task. You will need to totally trash your political party, or leave it and compete with it. For what it is worth, I don’t think change is possible inside the Democratic Party. Change is possible within the Republican Party but if you can’t, the road gets a lot harder.
The rise of Trump has been good for Republicans in this way. It’s attracting the non-elites who work hard and simply want to be left alone. The pin-striped country club Republicans with grad degrees are uncomfortable with them. The ones that are totally uncomfortable leave and say they don’t have a party anymore. In most cases, they were grifters anyway. Looking at you Paul Ryan. Others shake hands with them.
I strongly disagree with Trump’s ideas around tariffs. I don’t like a lot of the ways he carries himself. However, there is no other way forward today. It’s a long game and we are just getting started. Even if he is elected, Trump will go away in 2028. There are other people inside the Republican Party that can lead. The bench is deep. I’d be extremely happy with 8 years of Youngkin or DeSantis, then 8 years of the other.
What we need to be talking about now is how to re-engineer America to get back to its founding. It’s not Make America Great Again. It’s Make America Work Again. But, work for individuals, not special interests.
The stuff that has been passed since Woodrow Wilson until today is all about crony capitalism. We need to enable individual liberty which creates a lot of space for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs lead us forward and with the amount of technological innovation that’s happening, America can make huge strides and better all of humanity if we get our act together.
It’s great to understand the writing of John Locke, Hume and the others that formed the basis of logic the Founders used to create America. However, now we need strategy and execution to get it back.
Here is a checklist of what needs to be done to get the original America Tocqueville and others envied:
Repeal the 16th Amendment and institute the Fair Tax.
Repeal the 17th Amendment and let state legislators pick Senators.
The 16th Amendment is an obvious repeal, especially given the recent SCOTUS decision that opens the door to taxes on unrealized gains. Taxes aren’t revenue generators they are political instruments. By repealing the amendment and instituting a Fair Tax, we get rid of all of it. We put thousands of pages of tax law into the dumpster fire never to return. Liberty and freedom get returned to individuals. Businesses can make decisions based on economics, not taxes. In the words of e/acc on X, it will be a huge growth driver for the American economy.
The 17th is trickier. People like to have a voice. But, the Senate isn’t the cooling saucer it was designed to be. It’s a small House of Representatives. Prior to the 17th amendment, people did have a voice but it was via their state legislators. The Senate was accountable to their states. That makes the debate different.
Federalist Paper 62 authored by James Madison outlines the reasoning for a separate body from the House. Madison outlines the Senate as an intricate part of the federalism the founders were trying to build. A centralized government that was charged with national defense and administering the broad rights of citizens combined with the several states which were microcosms of the federal government. Little laboratories of freedom.
It is recommended by the double advantage of favouring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former; and may form a convenient link between the two systems.
For those that want to get rid of the Electoral College, Madision says this:
that the equal vote allowed to each state, is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual states, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty.
Why is the separateness of the Senate important? Here is Madison’s answer.
No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence first of a majority of the people, and then of a majority of the states. It must be acknowledged that this complicated check on legislation may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial; and that the peculiar defence which it involves in favour of the smaller states would be more rational, if any interests common to them, and distinct from those of the other states, would otherwise be exposed to peculiar danger. But as the larger states will always be able by their power over the supplies to defeat unreasonable exertions of this prerogative of the lesser states; and as the facility and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable, it is not impossible that this part of the constitution may be more convenient in practice than it appears to many in contemplation.
The way our Constitution works is the House is the first place legislation is introduced. The people have a voice and their say. Then, it gets passed to the Senate where the individual states have their say. Today, the Senate is a mini-House.
Repealing the 17th Amendment will empower states. By virtue of that, it empowers individual voters who vote for state legislatures. Repeal of the Amendment made those local races a lot more important.
Overturning Wickard also requires an explanation. Wickard has to do with the Commerce Clause. It was a poorly thought-out decision that occurred during the Great Depression. It rises occasionally but the last time it really made its way into public discussion was when Obamacare was passed. The government said there was an individual mandate for insurance. Everyone must be insured. The Constitution actually has no language that allows for that.
Even if you think it’s a “good idea” or a “public good”, there is nothing in the original law that says a government can force anyone to have insurance. In this particular case, the SCOTUS decided that the government could stabilize the price of wheat better than the free market.
The Federalist Society writes:
The Court reasoned that Congress could regulate activity within a single state under the Commerce Clause, even if each individual activity had a trivial effect on interstate commerce, as long as the intrastate activity viewed in the aggregate would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. To this extent, the opinion went against prior decisions that had analyzed whether an activity was local, or whether its effects were direct or indirect.
Think about this broadly. This decision opened the door for Congress to regulate many things in our lives beyond just interstate commerce. Repeal would throw out hundreds of pages of the Federal Register, but it is better to do that than try and decide which pages are worthwhile and which ones aren’t.
Cornell Law writes:
In the most far-reaching application of the federal government’s power to regulate commerce ever found in a Supreme Court decision, the Court concluded that the commerce clause authorized congressional regulation of noncommercial activities if they had a substantial effect on commerce. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) stressed that one purpose of the AAA was to increase the price of wheat. “Home-grown wheat … competes with wheat in commerce.” Therefore, the commerce clause gave Congress the power to tell Mr. Filburn how much wheat he could grow.
Hopefully, the above illuminates how much power the SCOTUS gave the Federal government back in 1941. That’s why the decision on Chevron and the others were so important, and why we have further to go.
Add no. 4: Overturn Baker v. Carr. The constitution guarantees a republican form of government. The court in Baker and related cases was to use the Equal Protection Clause to insist that the higher house in state legislatures be apportioned by population, rather then geographically (say, by County). This eviscerated the voice of rural counties, where the bulk of raw materials (read food) for the cities is produced. (They also by being smaller have the opportunity to actually know who the corrupt pol is. ) The result is Illinois (southern Illinois just ends all of their surplus income to Chicago and is pretty darned poor as a result) California, New York and sadly now Colorado.
17 Amendment: The argument put forward to direct election was that states that were divided couldn't decide on who to send, and there were vacancies in the Senate. Would this in our current language be a feature, not a bug. If a legislature couldn't decide on an individual in the middle, to actually represent the State and not their party, well, maybe there should be a vacancy. Further, this makes passing any legislature harder (Affordable care, anyone?) This, particularly taken with the repeal of Baker v Car leads to a better representation (dare a say republican with a small "r") that the current system. Original was better, but progressives mucked it up for their own power.
Regarding Madison's quote regarding the states, I would say the same principle applies to counties within a State. Again, IL, CA. CO, NY would not be in the terrible shape they are in if Baker v Carr was overturned. A "... complicated check on legislation" within the state. In fact replace state with county in the quote.