Every Congressman takes an oath to "support the Constitution."
E. Corwin, Constitutional Revolution, Ltd.,
13 (1941). See also: Gary Lawson, The
Rise and Rise of the Administrative State,
Harvard Law Review, Vol. 107, No. 6
(Apr., 1994), pp. 1231-1254
JSTOR
You've probably never heard of
"the administrative state." Do a
Google search for "administrative
state" to begin your study. This is
just the tip of the iceberg. |
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Scholars and political scientists will tell you what most people
don't know: we no longer live under the Constitution, with its three
branches of government. We live under "Administrative
Law" in an "Administrative
State." James Freedman has called "the administrative
state" "a fourth branch of government,"[1] but
it is actually a form of government which Madison, as he wrote in The
Federalist, would have called “the very essence of tyranny.”[2]
Rather than calling attention to this tyranny, most congressmen have
continued to vote for higher appropriations for this unconstitutional
system. Both the Republican and the Democrat parties are completely out
of step with the intent of the Founding Fathers and the genius of the
American system.
While a few thousand bills are introduced in Congress each term, only
a few hundred become law, and this includes things like renaming a post
office and giving a medal to Frank Sinatra.
Most of the real lawmaking is done in the bureaucracies. These
unconstitutional agencies create ten times more law than Congress --
some 70,000 pages a year in "The
Federal Register."
"Congressional oversight" of these bureaucracies is
impossible; the size of government -- the "Administrative
State" -- is as incomprehensible as it is unconstitutional.
Here is a list of many key federal
agencies, departments, boards and commissions. These can be broken down
into the following areas:
Special Report: How Congress
Can Save America
The architects of "The Administrative State" despised the
Constitution and the principles upon which America was founded. Ronald
J. Pestritto writes in a Claremont
Institute essay, "Leaving the Constitution,"
[Progressives] understood that the greatest obstacle to it was the
Constitution of the United States—especially the separation of
powers—and the principles of the Declaration of Independence upon
which the Constitution rests. Politics and Administration:
A Study in Government [by Frank J. Goodnow (1900)] provided a new
vision for America's governing institutions and the arrangement of
national power. In subsequent works, such as Social Reform and the
Constitution (1911) and The American Conception of Liberty
and Government (1916), Goodnow showed how this new vision arose
from a critique of the bedrock ideas of American government. He
complained about the "reverence" Americans had for their
founding, which he regarded as "superstitious" and an
obstacle to genuine political reform. In particular, he held that the
focus on government's permanent duty to protect individual natural
rights had impeded the marked expansion of governmental power that
Progressives desired. He objected that the founders' principles were
"permeated by the theories of social compact and natural
right," which he regarded as "worse than useless" since
they "retard development."
Goodnow wrote:
The rights which [an individual] possesses are...conferred upon
him, not by his Creator, but
rather by the society to which he belongs. What they are is to be
determined by the legislative authority in view of the needs of that
society. Social expediency, rather than natural
right, is thus to determine the sphere of individual freedom of
action.
THE
LEGAL ORIGINS OF THE
MODERN AMERICAN STATE
William J. Novak
National Bureau of Economic Research
Corruption and Reform Planning Meeting
July 14, 2002
Between 1877 and 1937 (between the formal end of
Reconstruction and the formal constitutional ratification of the New
Deal), the American system of governance was transformed with momentous
implications for twentieth-century social and economic life.
Nineteenth-century traditions of self-government and local citizenship
were replaced by a modern approach to positive statecraft.... This late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolution in governance is best
characterized as “The Creation of the American Liberal State.”
By “The Creation of the American Liberal State” I
mean to suggest that the period from 1877 to 1937 was not just an “age
of reform” or a “response to industrialism” or a “search for
order” (Hofstadter 1955; Hays 1957; Wiebe 1967). Rather, it was an era
marked by the specific and unambiguous emergence of a new regime of
American governance -- the modern liberal state. Nineteenth-century
patterns of social governance and local
economic regulation -- what I have described elsewhere (Novak 1996)
as “the well-regulated society” -- were displaced by a decisive
twentieth-century reconfiguration of the relationship between state,
capitalism, and population in the United States. A
central nation-state consolidated around new positive and
political conceptions
of sovereignty
and administration radically extended its reach into American economy
and society.
Of course, this transformation in American governance
and the creation of a modern administrative state in the United States
has not escaped the notice of historians, social scientists, and legal
scholars.
Whether characterized in A.V. Dicey’s (1914) terms as a
shift from individualism to collectivism or in Roscoe Pound’s
(1909) notion of a move from negative liberty to positive liberty or in
John Dewey’s (1935) ideas about the progression from old to new
liberalism, this interpretation emphasizes the
great transformation from nineteenth-century laissez-faire to the
twentieth-century general welfare state.