[From article]
Columbia law professor Tim Wu smarmily insinuates on the New Yorker’s website today that if colleagues like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe are going to speak on behalf of huge corporations like Peabody Energy in its lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, instead of defending “underrepresented” clients whose views otherwise “would not be heard,” then universities ought to rethink their longstanding policy of letting faculty lawyers work for private clients. It is deliciously self-satirical that Wu also directs a Columbia Journalism School First Amendment center as well, for the real purpose of his piece seems less a complaint about the wealth of Tribe’s client than an effort, however anemic, to silence Tribe’s defense of constitutional views that Wu dislikes. Free speech, indeed.
[. . .]
Unlike the Founding Fathers, Progressive politicians, with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the lead, envisioned government not of, by, and for the people, but rather by highly trained, nonpartisan experts who would use the latest scientific knowledge to make better regulations for people than they could make themselves through their elected representatives.
This enterprise was unconstitutional, even un-American, in itself. But as the administrative agencies developed—as they violated the Madisonian principle of separation of powers by merging together executive with legislative power, which the legislature had no constitutional right to delegate, and with judicial power, which the legislature most certainly had no right to delegate—promulgating rules, charging people and corporations with violations of them, and exacting penalties without the benefit of grand or petit juries, in defiance not only of the American Bill of Rights but even of the Magna Carta, they evolved into an utterly unaccountable government that is nothing like the democratic republic the Founders envisioned.
[. . .]
To the elites of Harvard and Columbia, Tribe may look like a traitor. But he is a constitutional lawyer in the most literal sense—and Americans owe him a debt of gratitude for attempting to restore popular sovereignty.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0506mm.html
MYRON MAGNET
Professor Tribe’s Transgression
He takes the Constitution seriously.
May 6, 2015
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