The Bureaucrats in Charge

By SergeyIT @ Adobe Stock

You haven’t seen much of Joe Biden lately. He’s mostly been on vacation in Delaware. In the meantime, the bureaucrats holed up in office buildings in Washington, D.C., are busy trimming away at the freedoms of Americans and their businesses. In The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger explains that the bureaucrats in charge of the government are working hard to reorganize society according to their own social and policy preferences. He writes:

“Regulation” is the word for what cabinet and agency officials appointed by the president do. Regulation is an ineffectual word, likely invented by a bureaucrat at the dawn of organized life to induce sleep so people don’t notice what the bureaucracies are doing.

Along with protecting the integrity of the Supreme Court, one of this campaign’s most important issues is what either candidate would do with the vast power and authority of the regulatory bureaucracy.

The Democratic left’s recent assault on the high court’s legitimacy arguably is more about regulation than abortion. The Dobbs decision affected one admittedly significant thing, abortion. But the Loper Bright decision this June was about virtually everything else.

It overruled a 40-year-old Supreme Court precedent called Chevron, which asserted that federal judges generally should defer to the expertise of bureaucracies. Chevron was the most powerful federal tool the left had to reorganize society according to its social and policy preferences.

The Harris campaign knows that aggressive regulation has become unpopular. Since evolving into her party’s presidential candidate, Ms. Harris has said she won’t ban hydraulic fracturing, reversing a pledge she made in her 2019 presidential campaign; and that she doesn’t support a mandate forcing the country to adopt electric vehicles. A fracking ban and EV mandate are regulation on steroids, rules that directly affect myriad voters.

Mr. Biden hasn’t banned fracking, but it remains Democratic dogma. Several blue states have forbidden fracking, led by then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2015 ban on gas drilling along the state’s border with Pennsylvania, an order bitterly opposed by the depressed towns in Western New York. The big-city climate-control lobby defeated those communities.

Suddenly in 2024 we have a Democratic candidate insisting that she won’t carry out her progressive party’s most sought-after regulatory goals. The reason of course is that significant numbers of people don’t want these rules dumped on them, most pointedly in must-win Pennsylvania. Fracking has been an economic boon for Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, areas once left for dead.

The Biden EV mandate is unpopular because electric cars are expensive in an economy filled with people upset about the price of eggs. Last week eight House Democrats joined Republicans in a vote overturning the Biden administration’s regulatory rule on vehicle emissions, whose intent is to drive doubtful consumers toward buying EVs.

Ms. Harris’s abandonment of her party’s regulation priorities is transparent opportunism, and surely temporary. A President Harris standing up to the congressional left will never happen.

Donald Trump has made reducing federal regulation a central element of his campaign, as it was in practice during his first term.

In his recent speech to the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Trump noted his first term’s one-in, two-out rule, which required any new regulation to be offset by eliminating the expenses associated with two existing regulations. He says he’ll push deregulation further in a second term.

Action Line: Only one candidate in the race for president is working to reduce the government’s heavy load on Americans and their businesses. You read here regularly that you deserve state politicians who will put your needs ahead of their own political agendas. Among the states, you have choices. The best of those choices are cataloged in Your Survival Guy’s 2024 Super States. On the federal level, the only choice comes with a vote. Choose wisely. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West (RIP JB) and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.

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