Background: This is the seventh in a series of blog posts about Mark Levin’s excellent and inspiring book, The Liberty Amendments.
I hope to convey Levin's major messages and inspire others to engage in the Convention of States (COS) project and join its underlying and growing grassroots movement to restore liberty and self-governance. I also hope to inspire you to read this book. The prior article in the series summarizes Levin’s arguments for imposing budget caps and other fiscal guardrails and limits on Congress. The purpose is to reduce the chronic over-spending causing the exploding federal budget deficits, debt, and unfunded liabilities before it's too late. In this chapter, Levin proposes how to go after the over-spending.
Chapter 6 proposes an amendment to expire federal departments and disapprove costly legislation and regulation if not reviewed or explicitly voted on and approved by Congress.
Here is the full text of Levin’s proposed amendment (click the arrow to expand and view):
SECTION 1: All federal departments and agencies shall expire if said departments and agencies are not individually reauthorized in stand-alone reauthorization bills every three years by a majority vote of the House of Representatives and the Senate.SECTION 2: All Executive Branch regulations exceeding an economic burden of $100 million, as determined jointly by the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, shall be submitted to a permanent Joint Committee of Congress, hereafter the Congressional Delegation Oversight Committee, for review and approval prior to their implementation.
SECTION 3: The Committee shall consist of seven members of the House of Representatives, four chosen by the Speaker and three chosen by the Minority Leader; and seven members of the Senate, four chosen by the Majority Leader and three chosen by the Minority Leader. No member shall serve on the Committee beyond a single three-year term.
SECTION 4: The Committee shall vote no later than six months from the date of the submission of the regulation to the Committee. The Committee shall make no change to the regulation, either approving or disapproving the regulation by majority vote as submitted.
SECTION 5: If the Committee does not act within six months from the date of the submission of the regulation to the Committee, the regulation shall be considered disapproved and must not be implemented by the Executive Branch.
Simply put, Congress has delegated far too much of its prescribed responsibilities to the Executive Branch and its bureaucrats. Authority to legislate is delegated to Congress by We the People who are sovereign, and they shall not delegate it to others. When power to regulate AND execute are combined, as is the case today in the federal bureaucracy 
and administrative state, there is no liberty and the legislators, agency heads, and chief executives create and enact tyrannical laws. This was well understood by the Constitution's framers, and Levin quotes at length James Madison, John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu. Checks and balances and other structures in the Constitution reflected the well-known and historically proven need to guard against centralizing power and combining law-making/regulation and its execution.
Yet the progressive era undermined this structure per Levin, catalyzed by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. While initially thwarted by the Supreme Court, those justices abandoned course and gave way when Roosevelt threatened to change the makeup of the court. The federal bureaucracy has now become a fourth branch of government -- a largely unaccountable administrative state with vast powers to regulate and control the consequences of civil and criminal penalties. 
Several timely examples of abuses are cited by Levin including Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the Clean Air Act. Judicial review is common in that branch, but virtually nonexistent in congressional delegation to administrative agencies. It's time to rein that in and check it.
The impact is staggering. Each year the Federal Register adds hundreds of pages of new laws and regulations, with hundreds of economically significant regulations, imposing tens of billions of dollars in impacts. A significant portion – some estimates are as high as 80-90% – inappropriately and unconstitutionally come from the administrative agencies themselves in the Executive Branch. They do not come from Congress who are supposed to be the only law- and rule-makers, and are elected to represent We the People. Those rules from agencies are not subject to congressional review, oversight, or checks. It's gotten so bad that every day it is estimated that each American commits three felonies without even knowing it. Quoting Levin when the book was written in 2013:
The 2012 Federal Register, the official federal publication documenting administrative rules and proposed rules, exceeded 77,000 pages. The 2011 and 2010 Federal Registers were 81,247 and 81,405 pages long, respectively. In 2011, regulatory agencies issued 3,807 final rules, yet Congress passed and the president signed 81 laws. In 2012, the bureaucracy reportedly issued 212 “economically significant” federal rules, each projected to impose more than $100 million in economic costs. In the last ten years, the issuance of economically significant rules has increased 108 percent.
The existing checks on Congress are not working per Levin. In 2012, since 1996, the Congressional Review Act has revoked only one administrative rule. Checks through the Judicial Branch via challenges to regulations in court are very expensive and usually fail due to prior rulings. Those rulings declare that if Congressional rule-making is unworkable, it thus must be handled by Executive Branch bureaucrats. Ie, the courts reject the non-delegation doctrine, which undermines the constitutional separation of powers doctrine. The court challenges also fail due to the Supreme Court invented Chevron Doctrine which protects any "reasonable" regulation written by an agency in response to a broadly worded or ambiguous law of Congress. Reasonable is in the eyes of the federal bureaucrats of course, not in the eyes of We the People negatively impacted by the regulation. Fortunately, there was a recent, small victory for liberty: the forty-year tyranny of the doctrine of Chevron Deference was recently dealt a major blow. And progressives responded immediately in an attempt to restore power to the federal leviathan. More most be done! Reducing federal jurisdiction and scope of the bureaucracy is one of the three subject areas and pillars of the COS Resolution. Another is term limits on the federal bureaucrats who are responsible.
Levin provides hundreds of facts, examples, and precedents in Chapter 6 that show how expansive and abusive the federal bureaucracy has become, and why it must be limited through amendments. We the People must act through our State Legislators! Many involved in supporting the COS movement want to curtail these strangling regulations that micromanage us and cost us dearly. If Congress were going to rein itself in, it would have done so already, but it chooses not to act. Please sign the petition at conventionofstates.com to call for an Article V Convention to propose amendments to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and provide stronger checks on the bureaucrats in DC. And please volunteer to get involved in the movement. Our country needs you.
