Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Is to drain the swamp. … drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual, but- Can I say a word about the conditions he was operating in, because I think that’s why I’m far more excited for this time around, is that a lot has changed in the legal landscape. So, Donald Trump did not have the Supreme Court backdrop in 2016 that he does today. So, there’s some really important cases that have come down from the Supreme Court. One is West Virginia versus the EPA. I think it’s probably the most important case of our generation. In 2022 that came down and said that if Congress has not passed a rule into law itself through the halls of Congress, and it relates to what they call a major question, a major policy or economic question, it can’t be done by the stroke of a pen by a regulator, an unelected bureaucrat either. That quite literally means most federal regulations today are unconstitutional. Then, this year comes down a different big one, another big one from the Supreme Court in the Loper-Bright case, which held that, historically, for the last 50 years in this country, the doctrine has been, it’s called Chevron Deference. It’s a doctrine that says that federal courts have to defer to an agency… Federal courts have to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law. They now tossed that out the window and said, “No, no, no. The federal courts no longer have to defer to an agency’s interpretation of what the law actually is.” The combination of those two cases is seismic in its impact for the regulatory state. There’s also another great case that came down, was SEC versus Jarkesy, and the SEC is one of these agencies that embodies everything we’re talking about here. The SEC, among other agencies, has tribunals inside that not only do they write the rules, not only do they enforce those rules, they also have these judges inside the agency that also interpret the rules and determine and dole out punishments. That doesn’t make sense if you believe in separation of powers in the United States, so the Supreme Court put an end to that and said that that practice at the SEC is unconstitutional. Actually, as a side note, the Supreme Court has said countless practices and rules written by the SEC, the EPA, the FTC in recent years, were outright unconstitutional. Think about what that means for a constitutional republic, that supposedly, these law enforcement agencies, the courts have now said, especially this year, the courts have now said that their own behaviors actually break the law. So the very agencies entrusted with supposedly enforcing the law are actually behaving with utter, blatant disregard for the law itself. That’s un-American, it’s not tenable in the United States of America, but thankfully, we now have a Supreme Court that recognizes that.…

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