Althouse: It "never ceases to amaze" Power Line "when 'mainstream' potentates" like GWU lawprof Jonathan Turley...

May 25, 2013

It "never ceases to amaze" Power Line "when 'mainstream' potentates" like GWU lawprof Jonathan Turley...

"... come to understand what conservatives have been saying loudly for thirty or forty years, but somehow pose as though they’ve discovered something new or are offering brilliant new insights."

39 comments:

Rusty said...: I'm used to it.; 5/25/13, 11:56 AM
dreams said...: Liberals just aren't as smart as they think they are.

I remember years ago playing golf with a friend who told me about the time he played tennis with a Jewish guy (a jew who looked like a jew as he told me) and after losing to him, the Jewish guy called him by his name and told him that he just wasn't as good a tennis player as he thought he was. That was definitely an insult that added to the injury of losing.; 5/25/13, 12:01 PM
TML said...: If we all ignore obviously and objectively idiotic regulations, the apparatus will crumble.; 5/25/13, 12:01 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Better late than naked.; 5/25/13, 12:09 PM
Methadras said...: The screed that leftists are somehow smarter than conservatives is an impotent lie. They prove it daily from the president on down.; 5/25/13, 12:10 PM
G Joubert said...: Meanwhile, there are many on the left --maybe most on the left-- who believe the federal government is not big enough and doesn't have enough power.; 5/25/13, 12:14 PM
Richard Dolan said...: Turley and PowerLine are going on about the excessive power of the federal administrative agencies. That's all well and good, but they don't discuss what to do about it. Here's a place to start -- junk the idea of almost automatic deference to an agency's regulations construing the vagaries of the statutes creating them. It goes by the moniker of Chevron deference, named after the leading SCOTUS case, and it just got extended in a 6-3 decision by Scalia.

The problem with deference (OK, there are many) is that it implicitly enshrines the first, albeit unwritten, law of any bureaucracy: expand your turf, and adds powerful support to the second: above all, protect the bureaucratic home team. It also allows our elected reps to avoid their own responsibilities, by actually deciding on the limits beyond which any given policy should not be pushed. Agencies are especially bad at that (it cuts against the first law, among other reasons).

The Chevron deference doctrine arose, in part, as a reaction against too much policy meddling by judges in matters supposedly committed to the expertise of agencies. The diagnosis had some merit, but the cure was worse than the disease. Better to insist that Congress must articulate the policies (and the limits) and use the anti-delegation doctrine to strike down instances when Congress tries to dodge its responsibility. But that would require politicos to put the public interest above their Re-election interest, and would require judges to scrutinize admin regs without falling into the temptation to impose their own policy views.

If only.; 5/25/13, 12:20 PM
YoungHegelian said...: While it's good that Turley & his ilk understand bureaucratic overreach, they don't yet understand the well-founded conservative fear that the bureaucracy is not manned by none-ideological "experts", but rather it leans, especially in major urban areas where it concentrates, strongly to the Democrats.

Conservatives feel that human nature being what it is (and conservatives are all about human nature), that their concerns often can't get a fair hearing.; 5/25/13, 12:24 PM
Saint Croix said...: Bring back the non-delegation doctrine!; 5/25/13, 12:29 PM
SteveR said...: I think the cat is out of the bag. When you get down to the level of some agency crafting new regulations based on some act of Congress, the disconnect between the legislative process and the meat grinding of rulemaking can be startling.; 5/25/13, 12:39 PM
ndspinelli said...: Turley has been on Obama and Holder for a fairly long time. For some of the reasons conservatives have been, but more from a left point of view. He is a left/libertarian.; 5/25/13, 12:40 PM
edutcher said...: Some people were going off about the Feds in the 30s; more after they got out of the Army at the end of WWII and even more in the wake of the Great Society and the War on Poverty.

To suddenly discover it now is to show just how deep in the tank you've been.; 5/25/13, 12:44 PM
somefeller said...: It never ceases to amaze when conservatives act as though they are the first or only people who have noticed or seen problems with a particular phenomenon. Analysis and criticism of bureaucracy hasn't been something limited to the pages of National Review.; 5/25/13, 12:46 PM
Anonymous said...: This just proves the cocoon that lefties live in---deliberately. They have refused to listen to any criticism of the left-wing government theories thrown about since..well, Hayek is a good start, but Mises is even more stark.

They stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la".

Dumb, deliberately ignorant pieces of trash, every last one of them. Out to be put down.

Enjoy the decline, morons!; 5/25/13, 12:58 PM
Aridog said...: Uh, hello there. I think I've remarked on the federal institutionalized bureaucracy several times now. The senior elements never leave town, they just run up a new flag for passing administrations....administrations that are merely implements to their own ascension.; 5/25/13, 1:14 PM
Michael K said...: "Analysis and criticism of bureaucracy hasn't been something limited to the pages of National Review."

No, American Spectator and the Wall Street Journal have been writing about it for a while.

There was some criticism when Bush was president but it suddenly stopped about four and a half years ago.; 5/25/13, 1:17 PM
YoungHegelian said...: @somefeller,

Analysis and criticism of bureaucracy hasn't been something limited to the pages of National Review.

No, but left-wing criticism of government as opposed to corporate bureaucracy generally focuses on issues such as regulatory capture, where an industry controls the government agency that's supposed to control it, or, how a bureaucracy can be made either more a reflection of the popular will or can be "rationalized" in some fashion.

Right-wing criticism of government bureaucracy seeks not so much its improvement, but its elimination. It is a necessary evil, and not particularly amenable to rationalization.; 5/25/13, 1:21 PM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: Did anyone use the word "Byzantine?"

I clicked on the link but got blasted by a bunch of pop-ups, and animations, and other shit so fuck them.

Powerline got boring a while ago, anyway.

A man can take only so much English soccer and Miss Universe coverage.

Wasn't there a guy named ass-rocket or something?; 5/25/13, 1:23 PM
Original Mike said...: Anybody with a lick of sense becomes conservative eventually.; 5/25/13, 1:23 PM
Original Mike said...: "From here Turley goes of (sic)the rails a bit, but failing to understand that Congress actually wants it this way."

Yes they do. It allows them to blame someone else for any consequence that anybody doesn't like. Cowards.; 5/25/13, 1:29 PM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: Confucius supposedly said that "if you would rule a country, first get control of the language."

We have gotten very sloppy and lazy at precise use of our language, and it causes us to miss things that would otherwise always be up front.

In this case, if we would learn to replace the phrase "the government", with the phrase "the people in government" ("the people in the State Department" rather than "the State Department", "the people in the IRS" rather than "the IRS"), we would be more constantly on the lookout for failures, and far less surprised when they occur.; 5/25/13, 1:32 PM
Phil 314 said...: Have you got a 27B - 6?"; 5/25/13, 1:47 PM
Baron Zemo said...: We just need to follow the example of Andrew Jackson.; 5/25/13, 1:49 PM
Unknown said...: If libs are finding this out and exposing it during a Democratic administration we should let them do it and even let them think they thought of it rather than shut it if by claiming we knew it all along.
Parents of college students recognize this sudden awareness of home truths.; 5/25/13, 1:52 PM
Unknown said...: shut it off; 5/25/13, 1:55 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: Random subtitles Phil's Brazil clip. I never saw that before. They go to a different movie.; 5/25/13, 2:01 PM
Howard said...: Wyo Sis

+6.0221413e+23; 5/25/13, 2:03 PM
Sam L. said...: The programming is strong on the Left.; 5/25/13, 2:04 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5/25/13, 2:04 PM
edutcher said...: somefeller said...

It never ceases to amaze when conservatives act as though they are the first or only people who have noticed or seen problems with a particular phenomenon.

Only because the Lefties think the answer to everything is more government is the answer to everything and usually it's the problem.; 5/25/13, 2:22 PM
Unknown said...: Howard
I'm not sophisticated enough to get your reference. That's why I post with Wyoming in my name.
My dad used to say when driving out of state "Let them watch out for me, they can see my Wyoming plates."; 5/25/13, 2:23 PM
Indigo Red said...: Playing in the background is the argument in favor of the spoils system over the professional bureaucracy.; 5/25/13, 2:42 PM
jr565 said...: I remember when Barack Obama said the debt under Bush was reckless and unpatriotic even! Those democracts learned all about fiscal restraint and overspending when Bush was in office. But then forgot the lesson as soon as Obama took office.
In truth, they never learned the lesson. It was just a cudgel used to beat Bush about the head with. A mere talking point

As is Johnathan Turley's aha moment. Or if it isn't simply a self serving argument to get out of defending that which he has stood for his whole life, now that it's shown (YET AGAIN) to not work, then how much do you want to bet that the amnesia will kick in tomorrow, when he forgets his epiphany Memento style as if he never uttered the words to begin with.

What was I saying yesterday? I forget.; 5/25/13, 3:08 PM
Rusty said...: somefeller said...
It never ceases to amaze when conservatives act as though they are the first or only people who have noticed or seen problems with a particular phenomenon.

We were waiting for you to say something.
But you never did.; 5/25/13, 4:01 PM
kcom said...: "Conservatives feel that human nature being what it is (and conservatives are all about human nature), that their concerns often can't get a fair hearing."

You know what you should do. You should form a 501(c)(4) to publicize the problem.; 5/25/13, 5:00 PM
mariner said...: Indigo Red,
Playing in the background is the argument in favor of the spoils system over the professional bureaucracy.

This is an example of what SomeoneHasToSayIt wrote @1:32.

The idea of elected officers having direct control over their employees is vilified by describing it as "spoils".

An unaccountable bureaucracy is praised as being "professional".

Maybe we should remind people that permanent untouchable bureaucrats are the reason a new broom can't sweep clean.; 5/25/13, 7:54 PM
mariner said...: wyo sis,
I'm not sophisticated enough to get your reference.

Howard's reference was to Avogadro's Number, but I'm not sure how it's relevant in this discussion.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.; 5/25/13, 7:58 PM
Hyphenated American said...: "It never ceases to amaze when conservatives act as though they are the first or only people who have noticed or seen problems with a particular phenomenon. Analysis and criticism of bureaucracy hasn't been something limited to the pages of National Review.

That's like saying "conservatives were not the only ones who noticed that soviet countries were ruled by ruthless dictators" or that "not only conservative groups were audited by the obama's IRS"

Of course, it was Hayek in "road to serfdom", a book openly hated by the left explained how socialist bureaucracy works. It is indeed the conservative (or classical liberal if,you want) discovery that big government inevitably leads,to people losing control over the government, and abuses become inevitable like hangover after drinking cheap portwine; 5/26/13, 12:07 AM
Kirk Parker said...: Richard Dolan (and Althouse)

Interesting point about Chevron deference, but it makes me wonder: why shouldn't the rule of lenity apply here too?; 5/26/13, 4:23 PM