Roll Call yesterday carried a story about a case SCOTUS is about to hear.  The essence – “AT&T and Verizon have contested determinations by the FCC that they violated consumer privacy rules and owed $57 million and $47 million, respectively. They argued that the FCC process, which Congress created in 1960, violated the constitutional right to a jury trial.”  You bet your bottom dollar it did!

Slowly, but surely, SCOTUS is dismantling the Administrative State.  Astute readers will recall, from 2024, SEC v Jarkesy which was widely heralded as the end of Chevron Deference.  Like most monumental things the Roberts court does, the moves are neither sudden nor dramatic.  Jarkesy took the pins out from under Chevron Deference, but fell short of the kind of radical change that so many of us longed for.  This case now before the court will weaken the structure even further.

We saw this approach with Obamacare – the Court did not declare it blatantly unconstitutional, but ruled in a fashion that made it unworkable and so over the course of several years it has fallen apart – now almost completely.  I am reminded of the movie Force Ten From Navarone.  It is the story of a small group of men sent to blow up a dam in Nazi held territory.  When they finally set the bomb, and blow it, it appears nothing has happened.  In fact the explosion has weakened the dam and they have to wait for the massive amount of water behind it to do the rest.  The results are spectacular.  Here is the critical scene. It’s the Roberts court in a nutshell, weaken the clearly unconstitutional legal structure just enough to let the weight of common sense take over.

The extrajudicial administrative hearing structure of the administrative state, which this new case addresses directly, while unconstitutional is also downright extortive.  Verizon and AT&T can fight these expensive administrative and legal battles, but the tens of thousands of small businesses out there cannot.  And so they run afoul of some agency or the other and are called into a meeting in which some guy with 25 or 30 employees is called before a panel, composed of the very people that are accusing him…told he has to pay fines and costs that amount to a significant percentage of his gross annual sales (worry not the agency is willing to work out a structured payment deal, he is told) or…face hiring a lawyer that will cost nearly as much as the fine just levied…only to end up losing the case anyway.  In the end how is that any different than the mob showing up at a store front, dropping some fragile inventory on the floor, shattering it, and telling the shop owner what a shame it would be if some “accident” hit the store?

The Roll Call article is, of course, all worried about how the government will have to restructure everything if SCOTUS sides with the big telecomms.  After watching agencies force the same fate on multiple companies in my career all I can say is “It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.”  It is about time these countless regulatory agencies were called to account.  They operate as legislature, law enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all in one neat little self-serving package.  That’s about as far from the balance of powers envisioned by the Constitution as one can get.

It is time for the next brick to come out of the wall.

And while we are discussing overbearing government – I was listening to the blues station on satellite radio yesterday when I encountered this song released a year ago or so, called “Blues on the 21st Century,”  It is a profane (be warned) ode to the stupidity that was the hallmark of covid.  It brought a smile to my face so I thought I’d share.