Congressional Issues 2006
GOVERNMENT
"The Administrative State"

Scholars and political scientists will tell you what most people don't know: we no longer live under the Constitution, with its three branches of government. We live under "Administrative Law" in an "Administrative State." James Freedman has called "the administrative state"  "a fourth branch of government,"[1] but it is actually a form of government which Madison, as he wrote in The Federalist, would have called “the very essence of tyranny.”[2]  

Rather than calling attention to this tyranny, most congressmen have continued to vote for higher appropriations for this unconstitutional system. Both the Republican and the Democrat parties are completely out of step with the intent of the Founding Fathers and the genius of the American system.

While a few thousand bills are introduced in Congress each term, only a few hundred become law, and this includes things like renaming a post office and giving a medal to Frank Sinatra.

• Congressional Workload -- 1947-2000
• Not Too Much to Show for Congress' Efforts

Most of the real lawmaking is done in the bureaucracies. These unconstitutional agencies create ten times more law than Congress -- some 70,000 pages a year in "The Federal Register."

"Congressional oversight" of these bureaucracies is impossible; the size of government -- the "Administrative State" -- is as incomprehensible as it is unconstitutional.

Ten Thousand Commandments - The Cato Institute

Has the Constitution Been Suspended? -- The Rise of the "Administrative State"

The Foundations of the Constitution have been Destroyed

Here is a list of many key federal agencies, departments, boards and commissions. These can be broken down into the following areas:

The Cabinet Departments

Major Independent Agencies

Obscure Independent Agencies

Bureaucracy and Government (independent.org)

Nondelegation and the Administrative State

(1) J. Freedman, Crisis and Legitimacy, 6 (1978).

(2) Quoted in A. Gulas, The American Administrative State: The New Leviathan, 28 DUQUESNE L REV. 489, 490 (1990). (With Madison's warning ringing in his ears, Gulas nevertheless supports the "New Leviathan.") See also Peter B. McCutchen, Mistakes, Precedent, and the Rise of the Administrative State: Toward a Constitutional Theory of the Second Best, 80 Cornell L. Rev. 1 (1994), in which he admits that we are no longer under the Constitution, but under a "second best" system. The great constitutional scholar E. S. Corwin was

told that Professor Powell of Harvard carefully warns his class in Constitutional Law each year against reading the Constitution, holding that to do so would be apt to “confuse their minds.” Certain it is that of the 6,000-odd words of the constitutional document, at least 39 out of every 40 are totally irrelevant to the vast majority, as well as to the most important, of the problems which the Court handles each term in the field of constitutional interpretation.