On Thursday, Fox News reported that the House of Representatives had passed the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or SOPRA, which would rein in the power of the executive branch to govern through regulation.

The article reports:

The House voted Thursday to overturn a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that Republicans say gave the executive branch too much power to impose regulations that cost Americans trillions of dollars each year.

Lawmakers approved the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or SOPRA, in a mostly party-line 220-211 vote.

Republicans have argued for the last several years that the Supreme Court precedent set in the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case effectively told courts that they should defer to federal agencies when they interpret laws passed by Congress as they write regulations. Republicans say that since that ruling, courts have failed to do their due diligence in assessing whether those regulations can be fairly justified under the law.

We are supposed to be governed by laws–not regulations. Laws are supposed to be passed by elected Congressmen who can be held accountable for the laws they pass. The people in the executive branch who are passing regulations were not elected by anyone and cannot be held accountable by the American voters for what they do.

The article notes:

“Since 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that courts must defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute rather than what Congress intended, the executive branch has begun usurping the legislative branch to issue regulations with the force of law,” Fitzgerald said. “It is certainly not what our founders intended.”

He added that the cost of these regulations have piled up on Americans over the last several decades.

“The total annual cost of regulation is almost $2 trillion, or about 8% of the U.S. GDP,” he said. “If it were a country, for comparison, U.S. regulation would be the world’s eighth largest economy.”

The article concludes:

“While Congress sets broad policies, we delegate authorities to executive agencies because we do not have the expertise to craft the technical regulations ourselves, and we rely on these agencies to carry out the policies we enact,” he (Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee) said.

The bill is unlikely to move in the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House has said President Biden would veto it.

But the issue could be decided by the Supreme Court itself. In the fall, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a dispute between fishermen in New Jersey and the federal government over whether federal rules on fishermen are vastly exceeding what was allowed by Congress.

The fact that this law will probably never become law illustrates the need to get back to the government our Founding Fathers created.