For the past almost four years, my job has been depressing. Today, it’s not. On the heels of Biden’s well-deserved and very public debate humiliation, the Supreme Court has come out with three magnificent opinions, reversing 1984’s Chevron case, which had given the administrative state forty years of virtually unlimited power; holding that the DOJ misused an evidentiary statute to convict hundreds of J6ers; and concluding that there’s nothing cruel or unusual in preventing the homeless from sleeping in public places.

Image: United States Supreme Court justices. Public domain.

Chevron was reversed.

In 1984’s Chevron decision, the Supreme Court held that federal courts must defer to unelected bureaucrats when interpreting ambiguous regulations. The bureaucrats made the regulations, interpreted them, and enforced them, all without input from the two constitutional branches of government to which they should have deferred: Congress and the courts. That’s how the regulatory state got so out of control. (Janet Levy described just one example of the bureaucrats’ immense power, along with noting that Chevron guided more than 18,000 published opinions since 1984.)

Thanks to the decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, those glory days are over. Roberts wrote the decision, with Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joining. The decision, despite being 34 pages long (because the Supremes are always verbose), is not complicated: Article III gives the courts adjudicatory power over “cases” and “controversies.” No existing law changes that authority and, indeed, 1946’s Administrative Procedures Act was intended to keep the bureaucrats in check.

Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, in their dissent, argue that this isn’t the case. Congress really wanted bureaucrats to make the rules, interpret the rules, and enforce the rules. Cut through the legal gobbledy-gook, and what they’re saying is, “We like how the agencies operate. Don’t change it.” And yes, I’m being facile, but that’s really what it boils down to.

There are few things that are more important than clipping the wings of the administrative state. Having this occur at the start of a probable Trump second term means that the path will be cleared for him to take the bureaucratic shackles off American initiative and creativity.

The DOJ’s abuse of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)

18 U.S.C. § 1512 is a statute that is patently intended to apply to people who interfere with an ongoing federal police-style investigation. The statute is concerned with people who do things such as destroying evidence (as Biden’s ghostwriter admitted he did).

Within that context, one of the forbidden acts (subsection (c)(2)) is to “obstruct...any official proceeding”—meaning, of course, the type of investigation covered in the rest of the statute. Garland’s and Biden’s DOJ, however, claimed that this clause could be used to describe interfering with congressional proceedings, a take that violates every precept of statutory interpretation. It is an indictment of federal judges in the D.C. courts that they let the DOJ get away with this and that it even had to go to the Supreme Court. 

Thanks to Fischer v. United States, which Roberts again (and which Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Jackson joined), honest statutory interpretations are back. The Fischer decision isn’t complicated, for it engages in the same analysis I’ve made, which is the type of analysis any lawyer with even half a brain would make: sub-clauses in a statute must be read in the context of the statute itself. As a wise person once said, this is not “rocket surgery.”

Barrett’s dissent (in which Sotomayor and Kagan joined) is untethered to statutory principles and deserves to be held up as an example of the fact that women, even conservative women, shouldn’t be allowed on the Supreme Court. Barrett did exactly what Ruth Bader Ginsberg used to do: Overwhelm the reader with a zillion details from which you’re supposed to conclude that there is a coherent principle rather than a patchwork of irrelevancies.

Also, it’s time to indict Jack Smith, who really admitted to acts that fall within 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)’s purview.

Cities can clean up their streets

In Los Angeles, fed-up merchants put decorated planters in front of their shops to deter the homeless. They did this because Los Angeles, like all other Democrat-run cities, refuses to enforce it own laws banning vagrancy (i.e., homeless sleeping on the streets). Los Angeles (which has a communist mayor) promptly removed the planters, claiming they weren’t properly permitted.

The real issue is that leftists are using the homeless as another avenue to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy. That is, they intend to break our existing systems to pave the way for America’s restructuring along Marxist lines. Cloward and Piven thought in economic terms because they were old-school Marxists. Modern leftists attack at every level, whether it’s denying reality with so-called “transgenderism” or destroying the productive classes by making their cities uninhabitable.

It's this mindset that saw leftists claim that the homeless have a right to sleep wherever they want, making vagrancy laws “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment. Given that the 8th Amendment was always understood to address governments using torture against convicted criminals (e.g., drawing and quartering, crushing, etc.), it’s disgraceful that a small-town Oregon vagrancy law had to go to the Supreme Court.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, Gorsuch, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, noted that the 8th Amendment’s narrow purpose and the mildness of the Grant’s Pass laws (fines, 30-day jail terms, etc.), are not the same thing. Additionally, the law doesn’t criminalize status (e.g., making it a crime just to be an addict) but, instead, constrains a behavior, something states have the right to do. There’s more, but those are the main points.

Naturally, the leftist ladies—Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—dissented. Sotomayor begins by saying that the homeless are being punished for the involuntary physical act of having to sleep. It goes downhill from there into a wallow about the plight of the homeless.

The reality is that American homelessness is a substance abuse problem with a common subset of mental illness. I know a lot about this because a friend of mine, while not homeless, lives in a world of homeless people and substance abusers. Their goals are always the same: getting drugs and alcohol. Food and shelter are secondary considerations. They resist anything that would remove them from their abuse.

These are sad, damaged people, but a society cannot survive by letting them take the lead in civic policy. Societies must govern to the functional center. That’s what the City of Grant’s Pass did and what the Supreme Court approved.