The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.

In the first part yesterday of this three part essay, I described how Americans are no longer the disinterested public that we have seen for more than a half century. No longer is the left the only group with passion. Ordinary Americans are now paying attention, and appear aggressively unwilling to allow leftist bad policy and slanderous blacklisting go unchallenged. The public might not be partisan Republicans or conservatives, but it is nonetheless finally aware and outraged by the leftist agenda that has dominated government policy for the past decade, including policies that encouraged the mutilation and castration of children, allowed the queer agenda in schools, promoted anti-Semitism and bigotry throughout the workforce, and fueled an out-of-control federal government that only serves itself even as it squashes the freedoms of ordinary people.

In today’s second part, I wish to dig deeper, because the public’s willing outrage has already caused unexpected major attitude changes in places where such changes have been impossible for decades.

Let us begin with a somewhat complex court decision that I reported on last week. In this court decision, a two-judge panel went beyond the specifics of the lawsuit before it to rule instead on the basic legal authority of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), concluding that its decades-long requirement that all government agencies obey its environmental recommendations in writing regulations was illegal, that CEQ simply did not have the statutory authority to do this.

As I said, the case itself is very complex. It is not even clear this ruling will stand up, since in the end the CEQ’s recommendations essentially reflect those of the President, whose authority to determine how the agencies under him create regulations based on Congressional law is legal and quite final.

The point however is not whether this decision will stand up. The point is that the judges were quite willing to rule on the legal authority of a government entity, and rule against its authority, essentially invalidating its power.

Such decisions have been unheard of for many many decades. Judges would never do such things. Since the mid-1900s they would always assume, without question, that such government agencies had the power to do what they were doing, and would only rule to refine that power, either to expand it or limit it somewhat.

The U.S. Supreme Court. Click for original
image, taken by Kjetil Ree.

Yet what these judges did last week is now becoming the norm, not the exception. The most well known examples are of course two recent Supreme Court decisions. First, the court ruled that the Roe v Wade decision was unconstitutional, that the power to regulation abortions was never given to the courts or the federal government, that the Constitution is very clear, this issue should be regulated by the states, and the states only.

The outrage on the left was of course insane, claiming falsely that this decision banned abortion. The idea that a court would invalid such a long-standing previous ruling had become inconceivable to them. And yet, the Supreme Court did it in an act of courage not seen since the 1950s.

The second Supreme Court ruling was its decision in June to strike down a 1984 court ruling, dubbed “Chevron”, that for decades had given the federal bureaucracy enormous power to interpret the laws passed by Congress however it wished. Under Chevron, the courts had been required to accept the bureaucracy’s interpretations of the law. The Supreme Court’s new ruling threw this out, stating instead that it is “the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

In both of these cases, like the CEQ decision above, the Supreme Court was invalidating some basic premises about the power of the federal government that had been accepted as normal for many decades.

These Supreme Court decisions are the most well known, but they are only two of many. In addition to the CEQ ruling above, the courts are also now considering invalidating the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) administrative enforcement procedures. This is on top of the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling that invalidated similar enforcement procedures at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

All these decisions suggest that the outrage of the public has clearly percolated into the unemotional and thoughtful legal reasoning of the court system. These decisions by judges indicate that they too feel that same outrage, but being judges they can only rule based on law and rational reasoning. Their response however has been to aggressively go back to fundamental principles and make unexpected but bold decisions against government power.

This same process can be seen in the difference between Trump’s cabinet appointments in 2016 versus now in 2024. In 2016 Trump picked people that mostly came out of the Washington swamp, based on advice from other people in that Washington swamp. His goal then was largely the same as now — to reduce the regulatory power of government — but then Trump was like the sleeping American public, unaware of how badly he was being manipulated by that swamp. The result was that Trump in his first term accomplished almost nothing in his effort to, as he put it, “to drain the swamp.” If anything, that swamp manipulated him into imposing the absurd and oppressive COVID lockdown policies that crushed what was then a thriving American economy.

Today Trump is taking no advice from the old players in Washington. Instead, he is picking people well known to be hostile to that swamp, outsiders who have repeatedly argued, in public, that major and very shocking changes have to be imposed in Washington to clean things up — including the complete elimination of numerous government agencies. And he is pushing hard to have these outsiders confirmed by the Senate.

At the moment it is unclear if he will succeed, but I expect he will, because if the Senate tries to block him expect the now outraged and very awake American public to make its anger known. They elected Trump in a landslide, and they want Congress to give him a chance to do what he promised.

That public anger is thus feeding the push for radical change in Washington, and because we really are a down-up society, where the people are sovereign and the power really does come from the bottom, it is forcing those in “power” to change what they are doing.

Will we see things change quickly? Ah, there’s the rub, and thus the subject tomorrow of the last part of this three part essay.