"All of us are in the same boat!"

Trump's behavior at the Bush funeral isolated the only group in the country who cannot put their rage and bile away for even a single day: the media!

Andrew doesn't like sentimentality because it turns away the truth and gets things exactly wrong. However, at funerals, he believes it is okay to be sentimental. This life ends in death. This life is a sacred and fragile thing. This life is urgent, important, sacred and beautiful. When it ends, it ends forever. That means all of us are in the same boat. A funeral is the one day when we measure a person's life by his or her successes. We are all living under a sword of Damocles called death. Death reminds us of who we really are!

A historian named Meachum said the key to a good impersonation of George H.W. Bush was Mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne.

Peter Wallison, former General Counsel to President Reagan is Andrew's guest. He has written a book entitled Judicial Fortitude: The Last Chance to Rein in the Administrative State. There are hundreds and hundreds of federal government agencies. The agencies of the administrative state are making the rules that we are living under.

A 1984 case called Chevron v. NRDC gave tremendous latitude to administrative agencies to make new rules we have to live under. Since 1993 more than 3000 new rules every year have been promulgated by the agencies of the federal government. More than 101,000 new regulations in 25 years! Congress is no longer in the game!

"Informal rule-making"

Oregon Muse recommends two other books that seem importantly relevant in today's America.

Liberty's Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State

...a dense work that will never be a bestseller but that nonetheless offers the most enduring conservative criticism of the Obama years. “Liberty’s Nemesis” (2016), edited by Dean Reuter and John Yoo and featuring some three dozen contributors, mixes scholarship, ideology and activism to argue that Obama has presided over an enormous and dangerous expansion of the administrative and regulatory state. “Its operations are so vast and its reach so sprawling that it lies beyond the control or comprehension of any one man or group of men,” Yoo writes, making “rational management impossible.”
Which is ironic, because the origin of the "administrative state" can be traced back to Woodrow Wilson who thought that government had grown too complex and technical for Joe Sixpak voters and politicians and instead, had to be managed by experts. So now apparently it has grown too complex even for the experts.

I'm glad to see that this issue has picked up a bit of traction. One of Glenn "Instapundit" Reynold's recent columns mentions The Administrative Threat by Philip Hamburger who traces the origins of adminstrative law back ever further:

Hamburger explains that the prerogative powers once exercised by English kings, until they were circumscribed after a resulting civil war, have now been reinvented and lodged in administrative agencies, even though the United States Constitution was drafted specifically to prevent just such abuses. But today, the laws that actually affect people and businesses are seldom written by Congress; instead they are created by administrative agencies through a process of “informal rulemaking,” a process whose chief virtue is that it’s easy for the rulers to engage in, and hard for the ruled to observe or influence. Non-judicial administrative courts decide cases, and impose penalties, without a jury or an actual judge. And the protections in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (like the requirement for a judge-issued search warrant before a search) are often inapplicable.

The Founders' government has been displaced by the Administrative State

What has now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the Administrative State — a transformation premeditated by its main architect, Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president, who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded “nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as obsolete. (See “It’s Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a modern country needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it, effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.

Accordingly, he got Congress to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.

...Adding insult to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call themselves “progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the embodiments and chosen instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving, irresistible future. In tune with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson and his circle studied, they claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized goal of human perfection. But that perfection, the German philosophers believed, would look something like Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For Americans to think that it is progress to move from the Founders’ revolutionary achievement—a nation of free citizens, endowed with natural rights, living under laws that they themselves have made, pursuing their own vision of happiness in their own way and free to develop as fully as they can whatever talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in which individuals derive such rights as they have from a government superior to them is contemptible. How is a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No lover of liberty should ever call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In historical terms, this elevation of state power over individual freedom is not even “liberal” but quite the reverse.

As these agencies have metastasized, they have borne out not a single premise that justified their creation, and their increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry attention to them. Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized with shock, many of those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just out of law school, with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge. Efficient? Can-do America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months and ramped up airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to nearly 100,000 in 1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair a bridge or lay a pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or even start because the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly to navigate? Only last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under their supervision accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Colorado River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to downstream Colorado and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the poisonous, fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those who’ve fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care.

Read much more here.