Rocky Mountain Voice

Menu

Tag: Administrative state

If regulators make the rules, what is Congress doing?
No Comments
GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, National

If regulators make the rules, what is Congress doing?

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com An interesting case in Tennessee focuses on Congress delegating its legislative power to others – for decades. Not just to executive branch agencies, but in some situations to anyone at all. In Tennessee Riverkeeper v. City of Luttrell, an environmental group from another state (Alabama) sued the tiny town of Lutrell, population 1,000, over its wastewater treatment facility. Neither the federal EPA nor state environmental regulators had any problem with Lutrell. But in the Clean Water Act of 1972, Congress explicitly authorized “citizen suits,” whereby anyone can file suit to enforce the law. Like legalized vigilantes. Lutrell, the boyhood home of Chet Atkins, fought back, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Congress h...
Read More
The danger of smart without wise: Why Wilson’s ‘expert state’ still haunts America
No Comments
Substack, Approved, Commentary, National, Top Stories

The danger of smart without wise: Why Wilson’s ‘expert state’ still haunts America

By Michael A. Hancock | Commentary, Substack Woodrow Wilson’s Fallacy of the Expert State “Intelligence is theoretical math—brilliant, abstract, dazzling to the mind. Wisdom is applied math—the bridge that stands. A society that prizes smartness without wisdom risks mistaking cleverness for truth, and formulas for foundations.” A century ago, Woodrow Wilson bet the future of American governance on intelligence without wisdom. He called it the administrative state: a system where experts—smarter than the rest of us—would manage society with the precision of science. Politics, with its compromises and accountability, was to give way to bureaucracy, with its charts, models, and rules. It was a beautiful formula on paper. But like so many formulas, it mistook cleverness for truth and ...
Read More
Gaines: Bureaucrats are making the rules—and you’re paying for it
No Comments
Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Gaines: Bureaucrats are making the rules—and you’re paying for it

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Rulemaking in Colorado.** Rulemaking is the process by which our legislature delegates the task of regulating specific actions and behaviors. In a rough sense it works like this. Say the legislature wants to make a law so that building owners don't scrimp on elevator expenses to the detriment of public safety. The legislature, rather than directly telling landlords what to do, will task an executive agency with a general set of constraints, telling the agency to come up with rules and regulations that "protect the public safety" or other such phrases. The executive agency then sets the actual policy: what does safety look like for elevators, how is it checked? If this strikes you as not being too far from having u...
Read More
Dr. Krannawitter: The Declaration—not slogans—is our anti-king document
No Comments
National, Commentary, Substack

Dr. Krannawitter: The Declaration—not slogans—is our anti-king document

By Thomas L. Krannawitter, Ph.D. | Commentary, Substack The American Revolution launched the greatest anti-king and anti-slavery movements, at the same time, and for the same principled reasons. Let me see if I understand: Progressives who insist on “No Kings” demand presidents—and an entire federal government apparatus—be constrained by the Constitution progressives have spent decades mocking, undermining, and ignoring? And the same progressives who warn against monarchical power happily support millions of unelected, unionized bureaucrats issuing and enforcing their own “regulations” that have binding power of law over citizens, even though regulations are not laws? No Kings Remember, the United States was born out of a fiery rebellion against a king and a d...
Read More
O’Donnell: One in 20 workers is a state employee—who’s footing the bill?
No Comments
Approved, Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

O’Donnell: One in 20 workers is a state employee—who’s footing the bill?

By Mike O’Donnell | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Communism, socialism, Marxism, Maoism, post-Mao Chinese-ism, and fascism may wear different uniforms, but they all march to the same beat—state control. One-party rule, diminished freedoms, political prosecutions, judicial overreach, hostility to markets, and the slow suffocation of private enterprise under the weight of public bureaucracy. Over the past decade, Colorado’s ruling class has embraced a philosophy that echoes these themes—what academics have dubbed “Radical Markets.” Promoted by groups like RadicalxChange, the idea is that centralized systems and enforced redistribution can solve economic inequality and displace what they see as the instability of free markets.  Whether Coloradans voted for this or not, ...
Read More
Amuse: Susan Rice and the buried sabotage inside the federal bureaucracy
No Comments
Approved, National, Substack

Amuse: Susan Rice and the buried sabotage inside the federal bureaucracy

@Amuse | Commentary, via Substack I will admit, when I first read that Susan Rice was still ensconced on the Defense Policy Board well into the new Trump administration, I thought it must surely be fake news, some hallucination conjured by an overactive internet rumor mill. Yet, with the bitter taste of disbelief still fresh, the facts became clear. Not only had she lingered, she had lingered officially, and with all the institutional imprimatur the position carries. It is the sort of stunning oversight that shakes one's faith in the assumption that elections carry consequences. Rice, a veteran of Obama-era foreign policy failures and perhaps best remembered for her calculatedly deceptive Sunday show performances following the Benghazi disaster, was somehow still whispering couns...
Read More
Rural towns squeezed by state’s bureaucratic delays and shifting wastewater mandates
No Comments
Approved, State, Water Education Colorado

Rural towns squeezed by state’s bureaucratic delays and shifting wastewater mandates

By Jerd Smith | Water Education Colorado Dozens of small towns in Colorado have banded together to protest new wastewater treatment permits that are designed to protect state rivers and streams, saying they  contain new rules that are too costly to implement and they haven’t had time to make the necessary changes to comply. The controversy comes as climate change and drought reduce stream flows and cause water temperatures to rise, and as population growth increases the amount of wastewater being discharged to Colorado’s rivers. In response to the towns’ concerns, the water quality control division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has taken the unusual step of holding off on taking enforcement action against at least some of the towns that say they can’t...
Read More
Grossman: In Trump 2.0, experience from the first administration will help tame the administrative state
No Comments
Approved, National, Washington Examiner

Grossman: In Trump 2.0, experience from the first administration will help tame the administrative state

By Andrew Grossman | Commentary, Washington Examiner President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration will have a running start on regulatory reform thanks to the experience of his first. A few key moves will go a long way toward taming the administrative state.  Similarly, Trump should end independent agencies’ exemption from the centralized regulatory review process administered by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. That will improve the quality of their regulatory analyses and actions and ensure that they aren’t working at cross-purposes with other agencies. READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Read More

FD863768-0ACF-495E-9D21-2EF784DFFA6B[1]

Join us at RMV's Freedom Festival

Click Here for Tickets!

This will close in 0 seconds