The U.S. government is $36+ trillion in debt and counting. The U.S. government’s Social Security and Medicare are almost $200 trillion short and counting. And D.C. hasn’t even passed a budget since 1996. Passing an actual budget is what D.C. refers to as “regular order.” Not passing a “regular order” budget is why we just yet again had this faux-cliffhanger Continuing Resolution (CR) idiocy over the Christmas holiday season.
One huge problem with a CR is the “C.” “Continuing” means spending continues to skyrocket entirely unexamined for efficacy and efficiency, which is more idiotic than ever in the Age of DOGE.
DOGE is, of course, the looming Department of Government Efficiency. Of course, government is fundamentally incapable of being efficient. No one spends other peoples’ money wisely or well. The only way to improve government is to reduce government. Here’s to hoping DOGE co-czars Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy know this and apply it to their efforts.
The reason D.C. is supposed to pass budgets is because they are supposed to scrutinize the budgets they pass, which is why D.C. doesn’t pass a budget. Because they do not want to scrutinize anything they’re doing. And they CERTAINLY don’t want We the People to scrutinize anything they’re doing.
It’s also why they pass amorphous, nebulous laws that leave the actual legislating to the unelected Deep State Swamp bureaucrats and the bureaucracies that litter the landscape.
Except leaning into the Age of DOGE is the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling cleaning up their 40-year-old “Chevron deference” mess. Forty years ago, the Court bizarrely ruled DC's unelected bureaucrats could self-determine the limits to their power. Shocker: no bureaucrats found any limits to their power. This unilateral bureaucrat empowerment was dubbed “Chevron deference.”
Last June’s ruling restored the proper order of things. The Court re-ruled Congress has to write the laws - and bureaucrats have to execute them as written with zero flights of interpretive fancy. (Except: good luck getting the bureaucrats to curtail themselves. But that hubris doesn’t change the impetus on Congress to write better, clearer laws.)
It is through this new lens that we witnessed the court system’s latest dumping of D.C. bureaucrats’ latest attempt to unilaterally impose Net Neutrality upon the Internet. Congress has never passed a law imposing the concept of Net Neutrality. Congress has never passed a law even mentioning the phrase “Net Neutrality.”
Congress HAS passed law that classifies the Internet as a lightly regulated “information service.” Last April, the bureaucrats at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) magically, unilaterally reclassified the Internet as a heavily regulated “telecommunications service.” So as to magically, unilaterally imbue themselves with the power to impose Net Neutrality.
The courts were yet again not having any of it. In July, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the power grab pending their permanent ruling. In December, while D.C. was yet again doing violence to the budget process, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals restored a little order to the legislative process:
“(A) three-judge panel sawed out the legal framework for the rules the commission had adopted in 2024, holding that the FCC was wrong all along to classify broadband providers as ‘telecommunications services.’”
Heck, the courts had been saying the FCC doesn’t have the power to impose Net Neutrality for a decade prior to the June Chevron reversal, let alone the December Sixth Circuit ruling. The latter ruling, not surprisingly, referenced the former:
“(T)he court ruled that ‘information services’ is the only definition the FCC could apply since the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision in June ended a longstanding precedent that courts should defer to federal regulators when those bodies interpret flexible guidance from Congress.”
Here’s where it gets morbidly hilarious. After a decade-plus of the courts saying Congress must pass a Net Neutrality law before the FCC can impose Net Neutrality and hundreds of thousands of wasted hours and hundreds of millions of wasted dollars frittered away on this idiocy everyone knew was doomed…Jessica Rosenworcel, the lead FCC bureaucrat who imposed April’s power grab, said this:
“(I)t is clear that Congress now needs to heed (the court’s) call, take up the charge for net neutrality, and put open internet principles in federal law.”
Well…duh. That’s been clear for over a decade. Since before the FCC’s first attempt to unilaterally impose it.
Welcome to the party, Madame Chairman.