Democrats Whine About Unelected Bureaucrats’ Diminished Power to Enforce Leftist Ideology

Democrats are very upset about the diminishing power of the administrative state, the so-called fourth branch of government run by unelected bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

Democrats, outside of Congress’s legislative authority, have used the administrative state since Lyndon Johnson to force their radical agenda into American life by weaponizing the federal agencies’ rule-making authority. That power was diminished when the Chevron doctrine was overruled earlier this year.

Agencies wrote rules under the Biden-Harris administration that were not necessarily passed into law by elected lawmakers in Congress, and now those rules, such as sweeping policies on global warming and transgender ideology, are being challenged in the courts and overturned, infuriating Democrats.

“We have an extremist Supreme Court with a very political agenda that is willing to overturn decades of precedent,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told Politico on Monday. “It has changed the legal strategy.”

“Congress is going to have to be much more specific and focused and set boundaries on the legislative agenda so that the agencies have a clear idea of what they can and cannot do,” Clinton-era Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman told the outlet.

Sharon Block, a Harvard Law School professor and former National Labor Relations Board member during the Obama administration, said, “Inherently, these kinds of limitations on the ability of the government to carry out these kinds of protections do impact Democratic priorities more than Republican priorities.”

Politico reported on the diminishing power of the administrative state:

The high court’s decision to end Chevron, a 40-year legal precedent that limited how judges intervened in complex agency policymaking, was one of three recent rulings set to stymie Washington’s regulatory machinery. The conservative majority also virtually eliminated the statute of limitations for challenging federal regulations and dramatically shrunk the power of the internal judges some agencies use to enforce their rules.

…

While having a successor from the same party long served as the simplest way for presidents to protect and continue their legacies, the high court has made it harder for Harris to defend Biden’s even if she bests former President Donald Trump. The court rulings, particularly one overturning the “Chevron doctrine,” now make it more difficult for Harris to secure her own agenda — or even, in some cases, for Trump to cement his.

…

Lower courts have already cited the trio of cases in dozens of decisions, according to the progressive legal group Democracy Forward. That combination means that even if Trump doesn’t win the presidency and the power to undo Biden’s work from the inside, trade groups and corporations now have a greater chance of knocking rules down from the outside.

The rise of the administrative state came during Woodrow Wilson, who believed in expanding the federal government to employ technocrats for rule writing in the quickly modernizing world of the 20th century.

Democrats have weaponized the administrative state since Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, which gave unelected bureaucrats the authority to enforce their rule-making, according to The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell. The weaponization of those rules, as Caldwell notes, came to full-fledged fruition during the Obama administration.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.