March 18, 2016
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: It's Time to Restore Separation of Powers
Last month I joined nine of my colleagues from the House and Senate to launch the Article I Project (A1P): a bicameral network of conservative policymakers working together on a new agenda of government reform and congressional re-empowerment.
At a time when our political system in Washington is held in such low regard by Americans of all political stripes, it may sound bizarre to talk about re-empowering Congress, one of the most distrusted institutions in the country.
But the premise of A1P is that the systematic dysfunction within our federal government is a result of a legislative branch that is not too strong, but too weak.
Our goal is simply to make Congress once again responsible – both in the sense of doing our constitutional duty, and doing it transparently so that our fellow countrymen can hold us accountable for the choices we make.
Over the course of the twentieth century, and accelerating in the twenty-first, Congress has handed too many of its constitutional responsibilities to the Executive Branch, creating a “headless fourth branch” of the federal government, untethered from any clear lines of accountability connecting policy, policymakers, and the people.
This upending of our constitutional order has led not only to bad policy, but to deep public distrust in our governing institutions.
Although Congress bears primary responsibility for this toxic state of affairs, the other two branches share in the blame.
In particular, the Supreme Court’s doctrine of “Chevron deference” has helped to midwife this shadowy fourth branch, by requiring Courts, under certain circumstances, to surrender their Article III constitutional power of judicial review to executive agencies. That is, with a sufficiently clever legal theory, an executive agency can impose on the American people laws that the people’s elected representatives never actually pass.
Chevron deference is hardly the only problem with the administrative state, nor is it the biggest. But it is one of the least defensible problems, with a clear and obvious fix.
The “Separation of Powers Restoration Act of 2016” is that fix. The bill would scrap the artificial and extra-constitutional deference standard set in Chevron and replace it with traditional judicial review of administrative actions. It would require courts to review challenges to agency interpretations of statutes or regulations “de novo” – that is, starting fresh from the text of the law or regulation itself, rather than preemptively deferring to the agency’s lawyers.
The only controversial aspect of this legislation is the unfair and un-American status quo it would reform. After all, interpreting the law, and ensuring it conforms with the Constitution, is not a novel understanding of the Judiciary’s role in our system of government. It’s what federal judges are for.
So A1P’s work to make members of Congress once again do their job begins with our work – and unanimous endorsement of this reform – to allow federal judges to once again do theirs.
Issue in Focus: Preventing America's Looming Fiscal Crisis with a Balanced Budget Amendment
Nearly everyone in America understands what it means – and what is required – to live within a budget. Regardless of zip code or economic status, most people can spend only as much as they earn. One person’s paycheck may be twice the size as his neighbor’s, but neither may continually spend beyond their means.
The one glaring exception to this rule is the United States Congress.
The problem isn’t simply that Congress spends more money than it brings in through taxes and other sources of revenue. The problem is that Congress has consistently proven itself to be incapable of exercising fiscal discipline and irresistibly attracted to perpetual deficit spending.
Of course, the Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o borrow money on the credit of the United States,” in Article I, Section 8. But our staggering levels of debt prove Congress is unable to exercise this power responsibly.
The U.S. national debt clock website helps put the federal government’s spending crisis into perspective. It shows that our national debt isn’t just astronomically large – it’s also constantly increasing, at a rate of thousands of dollars every second!
Currently, the total national debt hovers just above $19 trillion, which means that each American’s per capita share equals nearly $60,000, and a family of five can be said to own a portion of the national debt valued at more than a quarter million dollars.
Saddling future generations with a debt burden of this size is not just fiscally irresponsible – it’s immoral. And yet every recent attempt at spending restraint in Congress has failed. Budget cuts have been repeatedly postponed. Spending caps have been ignored or sidestepped with accounting gimmicks. The so-called debt limit has been raised routinely as a matter of course.
The problem with each of these failed attempts to impose fiscal discipline on Congress is that they are short-term. What we need are permanent structural limits on the government’s power to borrow and spend. Specifically, what we need is a constitutional amendment that requires Congress to balance its budget each year, subject only to limited and difficult-to-invoke exceptions.
A Balanced Budget Amendment was the subject of a hearing this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled, “Preventing America's Looming Fiscal Crisis: The Need for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.” As the hearing’s witnesses discussed, adopting a balanced budget amendment would be a difficult, time-consuming endeavor. But it may be the only step still available to fix the underlying problem and permanently end Congress’s addiction to deficit spending.
