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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, July 4, 2024

Chevron Yesterday, Chevron Today, and Anne Gorsuch Burford

By Rich Kozlovich

This article, Chevron is a big, big deal, by Jay Davidson was posted at American Thinker on July 3rd, fittingly as Independence day is drawing nigh, saying:

If you believe in limited government, or fear that government bureaucrats rule every decision, then you’re going to love the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. Conversely, some prefer not making decisions, or thinks a government employee is somehow better, smarter, less greedy.  Those people will hate this decision. Regardless, elimination of the Chevron doctrine is momentous......

He went on to say:

 In 1984, the Chevron doctrine (deferral) gave powers, that were supposed to reside with Judiciary and the Legislative Branch, to mere government bureaucrats and regulators across all administrative functions.  Chevron was the culmination of a century-long effort to increase the power of one person, the president, through bureaucratic (administrative) control. .......

I addressed that in my article, 1984: The Book, The Court, and Chevron, noting the irony of the book about dystopian government tyranny and the unconstitutional SCOTUS ruling in 1984.  

The author went on to say:  

In 2024, we see that dictatorship ending.  Thanks to SCOTUS, particularly Justice Gorsuch.  And, giving him his due, thanks to President Trump for nominating his three justices

As many know I owned a pest control company for many years and was heavily involved with my industry’s affairs, and Chevron was at the heart of so many issues we dealt with, and I can honestly say I’ve been disappointed in Gorsuch in the past, but certainly not this time.

I don’t know if most are aware that his mother was Anne Gorsuch Burford, the head of EPA under Reagan, and who tried to stop this insanity. She was destroyed by a cabal of bureaucrats, the media, and the green/left, as is discussed in, The Ghost of Anne Gorsuch Burford.  (Editor's Note: The link to the original article no longer works. RK) I have no doubt that impacted his thinking from a very young age, and I’m glad he acted on it. 

In that 2022 article the author claimed: 

With the Supreme Court now set to hear in February a major case over the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, some are already suggesting Justice Gorsuch might lack objectivity. The justice’s “tangled history with the EPA” is, Bloomberg reports, a “concern.” It’s a reference to the justice’s mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, whom, as Esquire retails it, President Ronald Reagan tasked with “running the EPA into the ground.”

“Revenge is a dish best served from a lifetime gig,” write’s Esquire’s Charles Pierce. He refers to the defeat, some 40 years ago, of Burford’s heroic attempt to reform the EPA. Yet there’s no reason to doubt Justice Gorsuch’s capacity to decide objectively the dispute that is at the heart of the case before the court, West Virginia v. EPA. It asks the Nine to roll back the agency’s power to regulate smokestack emissions...........

In years gone by I considered myself an environmentalist, meaning having rational concern about the environment and wanted just laws governing how industry and communities conducted themselves.  After so many years reading and writing about the corruption of the EPA I realize those were dark days intellectually.  I, as was most of America, and mostly still is, were misinformed, uninformed, and thinking the EPA was a really good thing.  It isn't!

One of my personal friends, who is now passed, was Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the founders of EPA, who helped write their first five foundational pieces of legislation.  Jay said after 1980 they didn't do anything worthwhile and needed to be dismantled, and in 2014 developed a five year plan on how to do it.

I read Anne Gorsuch Burford's book, Are You Tough Enough? ", and the fact is she got caught up in a backstabbing cabal of Deep Staters, environmental activists, RINO's, Democrats and a corrupt media.  When Harry Truman said "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog", truer words were never spoken. 

I remember those days and the media had everyone, including me, thinking she was corrupt, out of control, and had to go, and her supporters disappeared like a morning fog, and mostly because they weren't really supporters, any more than many of those who served in Trump's administration, taking the paycheck he provided and stabbing him in the back the whole time. 

Doubts have been expressed that even with this ruling it will be impossible to get rid of the thousands of "entitled, nasty, sucking bureaucrats in these agencies".  I don't think so.  

These are bureaucrats who will no longer be necessary.  I see  this as a budgetary issue. In business they’re called involuntary layoffs, and I believe we can get rid of 80% of all the bureaucrats and bureaucracies of the Federal government via the budget, and there are at least 438 of them.  Even paying unemployment benefits, the savings would be massive.

Chevron is a momentously big deal, and as time goes by the deal will get bigger, and better, if for no other reason the cost of regulations.   All these regulations were, and are, a vanguard to George Orwell's book, 1984, a "dystopian novel and a cautionary tale" who wrote about government tyranny controlling every aspect of human life. 

"According to a recent analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute U.S. regulatory costs in 2005 were approximately $1.13 trillion, equal to almost half of all of the government's discretionary, entitlement and interest spending ($2.47 trillion), and much larger than the sum of all corporate pre-tax profits -- $874 billion."  The cost of Federal regulations ran to a whopping $2.028 trillion in 2012. 

The cost of federal regulations to the nation's economy now? According to the National Association of Manufacturers, it's $3.079 trillion.   

Worse yet, these regulatory spider webs can, and actually do, make criminals of innocent people just going about there lives.  Much of that will now come to an end, but all these regulations will have to be addressed via lawsuits and forced off the books.   These agencies won't do it on their own.  Well, apparently that's what's happening.

“The era of ‘trust the experts’ is over,” Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff during the Trump administration, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There’s no doubt that crafty administrative lawyers will try to find an end run around this ruling. But overturning Chevron deference, alongside the ‘major questions’ doctrine decision in West Virginia v. EPA, has defanged the deep state. This is a huge win for checks and balances and putting the faceless bureaucrats in their place.”

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