It’s not every day that the federal government tells a private company where it can, or cannot, build a new factory and hire a thousand new workers. But that is exactly what the National Labor Relations Board did last month when it filed a complaint against Boeing Aircraft Co., demanding the famous firm build a new plant in Washington state as punishment for trying to put the facility in South Carolina instead.
While even The New York Times described the NLRB demand as “highly unusual for the federal government,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., took to the floor of the Senate to defend the decision:
“The Founders created a system of checks and balances — three branches of government — precisely because they anticipated these passions. Long after that system was created, a new independent federal agency was created in the same spirit of checks and balances. That agency is the National Labor Relations Board, and it acts as a check on employers and employees alike.”
Reid has it exactly wrong. As a single administrative agency, the NLRB’s authority from Congress includes creating rules (a legislative act), enforcing them (an executive act), and adjudicating cases concerning them with its administrative law judges (a judicial act).
Not only is the NLRB not in “the same spirit of checks and balances” that our Founders had in mind, it is the exact opposite. Federalist No. 47 reads: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
And the NLRB is jut one example of the expansive administrative state created by liberals. The Federal Communications Commission, Internal Revenue Service and Environmental Protection Agency are just some of the many federal agencies that mix and match legislative, judicial and executive powers in a way that is antithetical to our nation’s founding.
In fact, politicians in the progressive movement — precursor to modern liberalism — openly rejected the Founders’ vision. Woodrow Wilson, while still a college professor, pleaded in 1891: “Free us from the idea that checks and balances are to be carried down through all stages of organization.”
The progressive-liberal desire to be free of “checks and balances” carries through to the Obama administration today. Just days after the 2010 election, Obama’s wholly owned talk-tank subsidiary, the Center for American Progress, published a report explaining how by “concentrating on executive powers” Obama could bypass “the unappetizing process of making legislative sausage,” yet still “deliver results for the American people.”
Obama is following CAP’s game plan. The FCC has issued its first ever Internet regulations, the IRS has gone after charitable donations, and the EPA has furthered its global warming regulations. And, of course, the NLRB has Boeing in its cross-hairs.
This is not what the Founders had in mind. They grounded American government in the rule of law, where citizens know exactly what is expected of them. But the progressives and their liberal successors embodied by Obama and the NLRB believe in a very different system that gives “experts” near-limitless power to “deliver results for the American people.”
Electing a Republican to the White House will not solve this problem. Congress must begin to reassert its legislative authority. It must repeal bills like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank that empowered federal bureaucrats to write thousands of pages of new financial regulations.
Congress must also stop passing the decision-making buck to administrative agencies. Our senators and representatives should also restrict how many issues on which they legislate. Doing so would return Congress to Founders’ vision.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
