The Salt Lake Tribune is throwing a fit over the U.S. Supreme Court stripping the ungodly regulatory power of unelected bureaucrats while picking a fight with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) for daring to support the move.
“Utah politicians are wrong to say the end of Chevron is a boost for liberty,” The Tribune editorial board complained in a whiny July 7 screed targeting Lee and other Utah Republicans who celebrated the Court’s ruling. Under the so-called “Chevron Doctrine,” deference was given to federal agencies' subjective interpretations of ambiguous laws to enforce burdensome regulations on American businesses, which was upended by the Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2023).
The Tribune was livid and took a swipe at Lee by likening him to a notorious Star Wars villain: “Sen. Mike Lee chortled that, without Chevron allowing regulators to make decisions, ‘It’s time for Congress to re-learn how to make real laws.’ That is, to make laws that say what the rules are and aren’t left open to bureaucratic interpretation. That’s rich coming from a guy whose entire obstructive legislative career was so well summed up by Star Wars villain Darth Sidious: ‘I have the Senate bogged down in procedure.’”
Has anyone ever thought of Sidious as being gung-ho about stripping power away from dictatorial-like federal agencies? Perhaps The Tribune forgot to watch The Empire Strikes Back. Lee clapped back at The Tribune for mixing up its Star Wars metaphors in an exclusive interview with MRC Business:
The real problem with The Salt Lake Tribune is that they think unelected bureaucrats should have the power of a Sith Lord, regulating and controlling the masses by force choke. The Supreme Court has given renewed hope for the future of our Republic.
Lee hit the nail on the head.The Tribune cried crocodile tears in its first paragraph how the Court’s ruling was gutting “a long-standing legal guideline” that the supposedly benevolent government overlords “used to protect us from foul air, polluted water, adulterated food and ineffective drugs.”
The National Review editorial board stated that the left's “alarms about crippling administrative power are overstated.” The Raimondo ruling did not prevent “the agencies from exercising powers explicitly granted by Congress, or from pursuing cases that could stand up in court.” However, as National Review stated, if Raimondo “provokes in Congress the habit of writing laws, and in agencies the habit of obeying them, all the better. Agencies are but creatures of law, and law is but a creature of the sovereign people’s right to self-government — a government of laws, and not of men.”
But The Tribune couldn’t be stopped, and proceeded to fear-monger about power shifting away from tyrannical unelected government bureaucrats over-regulating the free market on a whim to alleged robber barons who are out to just poison people:
There is such a thing as federal overreach. But power taken away from the federal government does not magically diffuse through to the people. Power collects, as power always does, in the hands of the already powerful. In this case the corporations that will now enjoy more freedom to poison our planet, your children and you.
What a joke.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Salt Lake Tribune at (801) 237-2900 and tell it to stop acting like a shill for the federal bureaucracy.
