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Featured Articles: Introducing #PlatformPitches

#PlatformPitches is the name we’ve given to our new series of articles, offering suggestions to the Republican ticket. There are now three articles in the series:

Introducing #PlatformPitches: Our Suggestions for the Republican Ticket

#PlatformPitches: Time For A New COPS Program

#PlatformPitches: You Want Price Controls? I’ll Show You Price Controls

NEW: #PlatformPitches: More Paid Vacation Time

Does SCOTUS Have It In For the Administrative State?

We all know about Loper Bright. But in a recent article at Commentary, Adam J. White argues that overturning Chevron is part of a broader pattern by the Supreme Court to rein in the administrative state and restore some resemblance between the current state of affairs and the separation of powers as envisaged in the Constitution.

If so, this would be both highly welcome and interesting.

White highlights several other Supreme Court decisions that collectively represent a significant shift in the Court’s approach to the administrative state. One is SEC v. Jarkesy, where the Court ruled that the SEC’s in-house tribunal system violates the constitutional right to a jury trial in certain cases. This decision, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, reasserts the separation of powers and limits the ability of administrative agencies to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury. By requiring these cases to be tried in federal courts, the Court has placed a significant check on the power of administrative agencies.

Other important cases: FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Murthy v. Missouri. In both cases, the Court limited plaintiffs’ ability to challenge agency actions based on lack of standing. While these decisions might seem to favor administrative agencies, they actually reflect the Court’s commitment to maintaining proper constitutional boundaries, White argues. By ruling that plaintiffs lacked standing in these cases, the Court emphasized that not every disagreement with government policy can be adjudicated in federal court.

Very interesting overview overall.

Policy News You Need This Morning

#Reg – CEI’s Ryan Young: “The 2024 Federal Register topped 70,000 pages this morning. 9 proposed regulations, 9 final regulations, 119 agency notices, and 1,325 pages in today’s edition. It currently stands at 70,093 pages, on pace for a record 104,930 pages.”

#AI – One of the big barriers on AI progress is energy consumption. AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis has a good overview of the challenges there.

#TaxPolicy – Cato’s Adam N. Michel with the research suggesting that corporate tax increases are ultimately paid by workers.

#Macroeconomics #Inflation – Interesting new NBER paper from Domenico Giannone and Giorgio Primiceri looks at post-Covid inflation in both the US and the Euro area and finds that it was mostly a demand-driven phenomenon. (Another term for “demand” is “government spending.”)

#Immigration – “Cutting back on child-care regulations & bringing in more low-skilled immigrant workers can help make child care cheaper, enable more women to enter the workforce, & boost fertility rates,” writes the Mercatus Center’s Revana Sharfuddin. Restrictionists will of course hit the ceiling reading this. But we’d be more interested in something tangential, which is the idea that favoring women’s labor-force participation is good for birth rates. Much of Shinzo Abe’s semi-successful natalist policies were based on this idea. It seems to us like an empirical question at least worth exploring.

#Immigration – William J. Davis of the Immigration Reform Law Institute with what seems to us like a very commonsensical point: Unrest in Venezuela May Create a Caravan to America. It would be nice, once in a while, to plan for likely problems before they happen.

#CivilRights – The Southern Poverty Law Center’s long slide into dishonor continues. The formerly important group was taken over by activists and is now little more than a far-left hate group. They are now trying to get mainstream conservative groups debanked. This is shameful and is a topic for policy.

Chart of the Day

From the famous Easterly et al 2006 paper, “Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth,” the negative correlation between ethnolinguistic diversity and rule of law:

Meme of the Day