Trump’s Legacy: Beating Back the Bureaucratic State

While most people will remember the recently wrapped-up U.S. Supreme Court term for its ruling on abortion, it is actually the last decision that was handed down by the justices – the environmental policy case of West Virginia v. EPA – that will likely have the most impact.

As reported by The Epoch Times, this decision epitomizes “a new, broad-based approach that the courts are taking to halt a century-long effort by progressives to empower the administrative state and rule Americans by bureaucratic decree.”

In the case, the Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the White House to use Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations “to force America’s electric utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar.” This rolled back efforts by liberal presidents as far back as Woodrow Wilson to use the bureaucracy to usurp power reserved for the legislative branch.

And this potential sea change in government is the legacy of President Donald Trump:

First, the appointment by the Trump administration of 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. And second, the Biden administration’s unusually brazen attempts to push federal agencies well beyond their legal authority in order to impose a left-wing agenda on the United States without popular consent.

Pointing out the significance of this ruling, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D., told the newspaper:

There are already tons of lawsuits out there that have been winding their way through the legal system for years.

Some of those lawsuits will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, but a lot of them may be dealt with at lower court level simply because people can now point to the precedent that was set in West Virginia v. EPA.

In the future, this precedent could impact – and potentially invalidate – efforts by the Biden Administration to ram through new dictates on emissions via the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and guns by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

And even though Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent that the EPA is an “expert agency,” Bonner rebutted her claim:

These are career government employees. They are not experts.

Look at the experience the country had during the pandemic, where we had such experts as Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and Dr. [Deborah] Birx and others throughout the federal government who completely mishandled the public health response to COVID-19. If these are the experts, we need to free ourselves from experts, because they got it spectacularly wrong.

Likewise, he said claims that executive overreach is necessary to deal with emergencies and crises are “nothing more than a pretext for a power grab.”

Click here to read the entire Epoch Times article: “Brick by Brick, Courts Build a Roadblock Against Biden’s Administrative State.”