Hello, friends! It’s been a while since my words have graced your eyes. In my time away, I have given birth to my third son, William. Both baby and I are doing well. His big brothers are thrilled, while his dad and I are surviving three children as best we can.
But on to other matters.
When you were in school, you hopefully learned that there are three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. Each branch functions independently, serving as a check on the other branches and balancing them out. But in a recent oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the quiet part out loud and unveiled a fourth: the administrative branch.
This occurred during the Supreme Court’s recent hearing of a case called Trump v. Slaughter. The issue of this case is whether the president has the authority to fire employees of an administrative agency. This calls into question a much older case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935). That case held that the president cannot fire members of an agency that performs quasi-legislative and judicial functions, like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is again at issue in the current case.
In this week’s oral arguments, Jackson argued that giving the president the authority to remove employees from an agency would impede the agency’s ability to function independently, and, well, it’s chaired by PhDs and experts, and we’ve never seen that go wrong!
Aside from the fact that her argument is obviously ridiculous and makes us wonder yet again why she was confirmed by Congress (just kidding, we know why), it essentially says the quiet part out loud: Administrative agencies are meant to function as an extension of the executive branch. I won’t get into the ins and outs of the rules and why these agencies can make them because that would require me to write a book, and neither you nor I have the time for that. Suffice it to say, the only thing that functions independently and is afforded its own body free from interference of other branches is a branch of government. So to say an agency could be deprived of its ability to function independently is to say it is a branch of government.
Now, this isn’t a new idea. But I am going to take this one step further. If we continue to let Humphrey’s Executor stand, we need to start calling a spade a spade, meaning we need to call administrative agencies a branch of government. In so doing, we point out that there are only three constitutionally allowable branches of government. There is no room for a fourth without amending our Constitution. So the administrative agencies must go. They must be abolished because they are currently functioning as a threat to our constitutional republic.
This isn’t a leap of an argument. The Supreme Court is already looking to gut the agencies as best they can from their end. They already ended the Chevron Deference, which removed a lot of power from federal agencies, giving the judiciary more oversight over them. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has also written extensively on the need to end the administrative state, while the Trump administration has been knocking it down bit by bit.
So long as we have the wrecking ball on hand, let it swing! The "administrative branch" has caused a world of problems in our country with overregulation. Now that the quiet part is being said out loud, let’s argue it to its logical conclusion and deal with it according to the Constitution and abolish the administrative state.
Laura Clark is a wife, mother, and community activist. She currently serves as the interim president of Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, a conservative nonprofit law firm that fights for limited government, free markets, and strong families in the courts. Anything written by Laura for this publication does not constitute legal advice.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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