it is important to recall the three pillars of the Bannonite “America First” philosophy.
Earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon outlined them: national security and sovereignty; economic nationalism; and deconstruction of the administrative state.
.. As The Washington Post reported at the end of August, Trump continued to defy the wishes of his Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, including by reaching out to Bannon: “The president continues to call business friends and outside advisers, including former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, from his personal phone when Kelly is not around, said people with knowledge of the calls.”
On Sept. 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bannon told a private group in Hong Kong that he “speaks with President Donald Trump every two to three days.”
Mick Mulvaney Is the True Pope
Once again, naked progressive overreach sets Donald Trump up for a win.
Republicans, of course, have distrusted the CFPB since its inception. Partly the objection is practical, because its creation embodies the classic Beltway approach: rather than fix a broken regulatory system, throw another powerful agency atop the heap.
.. In this case, however, the objections are also constitutional. Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University law professor and author of “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,” notes that the lack of democratic accountability almost CFPB.
.. “This agency is so independent that it does not need congressional funding, and it now has declared itself self-appointing—even in opposition to the president’s appointee,” he says. “The CFPB is thus a reminder of how the administrative state can go to dangerous extremes.”
The Government Gorsuch Wants to Undo
But the reality is that Judge Gorsuch embraces a judicial philosophy that would do nothing less than undermine the structure of modern government — including the rules that keep our water clean, regulate the financial markets and protect workers and consumers. In strongly opposing the administrative state, Judge Gorsuch is in the company of incendiary figures like the White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has called for its “deconstruction.”
.. a small group of conservative intellectuals have gone much further to argue that the rules that safeguard our welfare and the orderly functioning of the market have been fashioned in a way that’s not constitutionally legitimate. This once-fringe cause of the right asserts, as Judge Gorsuch put it in a speech last year, that the administrative state “poses a grave threat to our values of personal liberty.”
.. As the court has recognized over and over, before and since 1935, Congress is a cumbersome body that moves slowly in the best of times, while the economy is an incredibly dynamic system. For the sake of business as well as labor, the updating of regulations can’t wait for Congress to give highly specific and detailed directions.
.. The administrative state isn’t optional in our complex society. It’s indispensable.
.. The rule came to be known as Chevron deference: When Congress uses ambiguous language in a statute, courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of what the words mean.
.. Justice Antonin Scalia reached the Supreme Court, he declared himself a Chevron fan. “In the long run Chevron will endure,” Justice Scalia wrote in a 1989 article, “because it more accurately reflects the reality of government, and thus more adequately serves its needs.”
.. Judge Gorsuch argued that Chevron — one of the most frequently cited cases in the legal canon — is illegitimate in part because it is out of step with (you guessed it) Schechter Poultry.
.. Judge Gorsuch is skeptical that Congress can use broadly written laws to delegate authority to agencies in the first place. That can mean only that at least portions of such statutes — the source of so many regulations that safeguard Americans’ welfare — must be sent back to Congress, to redo or not.
.. What would happen if agencies could not make rules for the financial industry and for consumer, environmental and workplace protection? Decades of experience in the United States and around the world teach that the administrative state is a necessary part of the modern market economy. With Judge Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, we will be one step closer to testing that premise.
Bannon’s origin story doesn’t add up
that October day when Marty Bannon panicked and took Jim Cramer’s advice from the TV and sold his AT&T stock, was when Steve Bannon had an epiphany: “Everything since then has come from there,” he said.
This could be Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking. This could be the indignant writers of the 2015 movie “The Big Short,” which ended by noting that almost no one went to jail for the giant scam. I also think of New York City cab drivers, many of them immigrants, who leveraged themselves for three generations to buy a cab and now have had their investment gutted by Uber. This is the human cost of disruption, which, if you don’t happen to be poor and drive a cab, is supposedly a wonderful thing.
If his father got fleeced, if “nobody [was] held accountable,” how can the remedy be less regulation? If Wall Street picked his old man’s pocket, why has President Trump appointed tycoon after tycoon who think the fairest tax is none at all and, in some cases, got immensely rich by collapsing companies and squeezing employees?.. But the Trump administration is not for new laws and tighter regulation. It wants to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which, among other things, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.. But Bannon’s “administrative state” boogeyman is not what flattened his father’s nest egg. It was not excessive regulation that fleeced his father