Democratic voters are very angry that the administrative state, the so-called fourth part of government run by unelected managers in Washington, DC, is losing power.
Since Lyndon Johnson, Democrats have used the administrative state to push their radical plan into American life by using the power of government agencies to make rules as a weapon. This is not within the legislative power of Congress. When the Chevron law was thrown out earlier this year, that power was cut down.
During the Biden-Harris administration, agencies wrote rules that weren’t always made law by elected lawmakers in Congress. Now, Democrats are furious that these rules, like broad policies on global warming and transgender ideology, are being fought in court and thrown out.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told Politico, “We have an extremist Supreme Court with a very political goal that is ready to overturn decades of law. The formal plan has changed.”
“Congress will have to be much more specific and set limits on the legislative agenda so that the agencies have a better idea of what they can and cannot do,” Dan Glickman, who was Agriculture secretary under Clinton, told the news source.
Sharon Block is a professor at Harvard Law School and used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board during the Obama administration. She said, “These kinds of limits on the government’s ability to carry out these sorts of protections do impact Democratic goals more than Republican goals.”
The administrative state grew during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson wanted to grow the federal government so that it could hire technocrats to write rules for the rapidly changing world of the 20th century.
According to Christopher Caldwell’s book The Age of Entitlement, Democrats have used the administrative state as a tool since Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation. This law gave unelected officials the power to police the rules they made. The Obama government was the final stage of turning these rules into weapons, as Caldwell shows.
