Society

Editor’s Note: This is another in a series of excerpts from the book “The War in Heaven Continues: Satan’s Tactics to Destroy You, Christianity, the Family, the Constitution, and America” by Gary Lawrence.

Next week: The New Plague of Locusts

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If I give you permission to drive my car, may you give that permission to others to drive my car? If I allow you to pick apples from my apple tree, does this mean you have the authority to tell your friend he may also pick apples from my apple tree?

No. Such authority is not transferrable.

Yet that is exactly what Congress has been doing with the legislative power vested in it by the Constitution. Our elected representatives have slowly transferred that power to unelected bureaucracies in fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic warning that “even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”[1]

Slow cancer. And has it ever grown.

So many laws have been enacted, so many pettifogging rules and regulations written, that power in America today resides overwhelmingly in over 450 major agencies, and numberless offices, institutes, bureaus, and centers under them.[2]

As of 2013, there were 1,430,000 pages of regulations in the Federal Register. Stacked up, it would weigh seven tons and measure 476 feet, nearly as tall as the Washington Monument, which it will surpass in 2016 as rule-writers churn out 60,000 additional pages of regulations each year.[3] Growing beyond their original role of filling in the details of laws Congress passes, bureaucracies have morphed into mini-legislatures writing administrative laws, all the while pretending they are only regulatory practices. But, to paraphrase an apt simile, if it looks like legislation, waddles like legislation, and quacks like legislation it is legislation.

We have the best form of earthly government and yet because of metastasizing bureaucracies we are suffering the slow operations that rob us of our freedoms one little administrative law at a time.

Back to the basics. Once past the preamble, the very first sentence in the whole Constitution states:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Think of that. The first topic the Founders addressed was who has the power to make laws. There is no ambiguity at all in that sentence: All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested .   Anything confusing about that? All authority to make laws belongs only to Congress, there can be no sub-delegation (it is neither mentioned nor implied), and those powers are restricted to what is explicitly written in the Constitution.

A priesthood holder, to draw a parallel, may hold the priesthood, but he did not create it. The same with Congress. It holds the power to legislate, but it did not create that power. The people did. Therefore, it has no right to pass that authority or power on to any other body unless the people so grant in the founding document. Which they have not done.

The Constitution grants no legislative power to the executive. It grants no legislative power to the judiciary. None whatsoever. All legislative power belongs to Congress. Extralegal administrative law is, therefore, but a sneaky way around the principle of separation of powers an undemocratic imperial parasite inside a representative democracy host.

Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger in his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? elaborates:

Most profoundly, the English defeated absolute prerogative power by developing ideas of constitutional law. The English constitution made clear that there could be no extralegal or absolute power.

Americans reinforced this rejection of absolutism. Americans knew the English experience with absolute power, and they feared any recurrence of it in America. They therefore framed the U.S. Constitution to bar any version of this power.[4]    

He quotes John Locke’s irrefutable argument:

The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. For it being a delegated power from the people, they, who have it, cannot pass it to others.[5]

So why do administrative rules today have the power of law?

[A]dministrative governance is a sort of power that has long been understood to lack legal obligation. It is difficult to understand how laws made without representation and adjudication made without independent judges and juries, have the obligation of law; instead they apparently rest merely on government coercion.[6] [Emphasis added]

In short, forces inimical to the Constitution have resurrected the abusive practices of old English kings and deposited them in the executive branch of the U.S. government and are enforcing them through intimidation and coercion.

Bureaucratic growth is a malignant tumor. It stifles dissent, initiative, and agency, and squeezes life from the body politic. As this fourth branch of government combines legislative, executive, and judicial powers within itself, the painstakingly built structure of our founding document is so weakened that the whole Constitution, how shall I put it, hangs by a thread.

What does that mean? Simply that a new form of government is about to replace the government the Founders established.

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Gary Lawrence is a public opinion pollster and author of “How Americans View Mormonism” and “Mormons Believe What?!”. He lives in Orange County, California and welcomes comments at [email protected].

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