The Patriot Post® · SCOTUS Readies to Rein in the Administrative State

Looking back, it was as if Steve Bannon had been peering into a crystal ball.

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and the bureaucracy. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.”

If he only knew.

Bannon was speaking at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2017, just over a month into Donald Trump’s first term in office. And by that time, the Obama administration’s diabolical Crossfire Hurricane scheme was already seven months into its effort to bring down the Trump presidency under the phony guise of investigating whether the Russians were attempting to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign.

Crossfire Hurricane ultimately failed to take down Donald Trump, but it certainly succeeded in hobbling his presidency. And its perpetrators — among them Barack Obama, CIA Director John Brennan, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, and FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok — were never held accountable — that is, unless your idea of accountability is the wrist-slap meted out to low-level FBI cutout Kevin Clinesmith for having falsified evidence on a FISA warrant that ultimately allowed the above-named co-conspirators to spy on the entire Trump team, including the president himself.

Bannon’s words about the unending fight to take our country back from the deep state, back from the unelected bureaucracy, were indeed prophetic. And, much to the chagrin of the Left, that fight continues to this day.

How so, you ask? In the courts — and including the Supreme Court, whose new nine-month term starts Monday and includes three key cases challenging the power and scope of the unelected bureaucracy. As NBC News grimly reports: “Long after Trump has left office, his judges and justices are making their mark … serving as participants, liberal critics say, in what Trump adviser Steve Bannon called the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’ In all three cases now before the Supreme Court, Trump-appointed judges were involved in lower court rulings that teed up the legal issues for Supreme Court review. The court’s conservative majority has repeatedly shown its willingness to limit bureaucratic authority.”

This isn’t the first time the deep state has been hauled before the Supreme Court, and it’s clear that Trump’s entire suite of judicial appointments — not just his three crucial Supreme Court picks — are bearing fruit. How refreshing it is to give the Left a taste of its own “lawfare” medicine.

On Tuesday, the Court will hear opening arguments in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association, a case about the unconstitutional design of the Obama administration’s overreaching Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the editors of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page report:

Democrats in Congress constructed the CFPB to be insulated from accountability by the political branches. This fits the progressive vision of an administrative state run by supposed experts who will instruct Americans on proper behavior whether they like it or not.

The Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB tried to insulate it from presidential control by saying the bureau’s director could only be removed “for cause.” The Supreme Court found that unconstitutional in 2020, and now the Justices will consider the agency’s funding mechanism that is intended as protection from Congressional appropriations.

The other two administrative-state cases being taken up by the justices this term are Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarksey, in which the Court will consider whether the SEC has gotten too big for its britches, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Court will determine whether to overturn a 1984 ruling giving federal agencies the power to interpret the law when a particular statute isn’t clear.

In yet another case with deep state implications, the Supreme Court looms over the Biden Federal Communications Commission’s effort to reinstate so-called net neutrality — an effort that even a pair of former Obama solicitor generals believe is doomed to failure.

Those on the Left who complain that these cases have a political component to them may well be correct, but they should remember: They’d never have been brought in the first place had these agencies not run afoul of their constitutional authority.

In any case, it’s long past time to begin clawing back American Liberty from the bloodsucking bureaucracy, and to begin restoring the limited government that the Founders envisioned. As Steve Bannon rightly noted, “Every day, it is going to be a fight.”