The Government Nobody Voted For

The Supreme Court has just done what the Constitution always demanded. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ruled that the President has full authority to remove commissioners at independent agencies with or without cause, and in doing so, overruled the 90-year-old precedent that made the administrative state possible.

A century of unaccountable bureaucratic power has met its constitutional reckoning. Woodrow Wilson’s project is finally coming apart.

The greatest threat to America has long been the administrative state and the politicians who exploit it. Every crisis becomes a justification to reduce individual liberty. Every emergency becomes a reason to seize more control over the economy. Every disagreement becomes an opportunity to pit Americans against each other and to silence those who dare question it. A government that operates this way has severed itself from the consent of the governed. It answers to no voter and has no right to govern.

Three things matter to Americans: security, individual liberty and the opportunity to pursue economic prosperity.

That is the whole bargain — the one the Founders grounded in natural rights. It thrives only when individuals feel secure and free to pursue their own ambitions, not suffocated by the government they empowered to protect them. Security enables liberty. Liberty enables opportunity. And the opportunity to prosper under this bargain is the American promise. The administrative state has been slowly destroying all of it.

Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives built the administrative state to do exactly that. They did not merely disagree with the Founders. They repudiated them. Wilson called the Constitution a “bygone device” to be discarded, and in 1911, he told an audience in Los Angeles to ignore the Declaration’s preface — the part where Jefferson established that government exists to secure individual rights. The Founders grounded those rights in nature, not government.