Peter Wallison has written a work of advocacy that could lead to action. An American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and lawyer who once served as White House counsel to Ronald Reagan, Wallison convincingly argues that the passivity of our judiciary has permitted the emergence of an administrative state that wields immense power, in defiance of the Constitution. The only remedy, in his view, is the reassertion of “judicial fortitude” to curb these abuses. Doing so seemed a fantasy before the election of Donald Trump, but now it could become reality, with a majority of Supreme Court justices sympathetic to what Judicial Fortitudeadvocates.
As others have done, the author traces the administrative state's origins to the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who believed that regulatory agencies were essential to governance in the complex modern world. The administrative state was subsequently enabled and expanded by decades of Supreme Court rulings that allowed ever more discretion to these unelected bureaucrats. The trend culminated in the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Councildecision, in which the Court effectively ruled that deference must be given these agencies in interpreting the statutes that they're supposed to administer.
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