Who needs Congress when we have bureaucrats to make the laws, Part 3

As my ol’ pappy used to say: Great minds travel in the same plane. Fools just think alike.

Today in Investor’s Business Daily, Thomas Sowell takes up his journalistic cudgel to pound on those who see no problem with bureaucrats doing end runs around the intent of the constitutionally elected Congress.

As others have, Sowell noted that the ObamaCare law passed by Congress and signed by the president specifically excluded Section 1233, authorizing the payment for end-of-life consultations. This was the section that raised the specter of “death panels.” But Medicare rule writers have put it back in.

Sowell writes, “Republican Congressman John Boehner, soon to become speaker of the House, objected to this section in 2009, saying: ‘This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.’

“Whatever the merits or demerits of the proposed provision in Medicare legislation, the Constitution of the U.S. makes the elected representatives of ‘we the people’ the ones authorized to make such decisions.

“When proposals explicitly rejected by a vote in Congress are resurrected and stealthily made the law of the land by bureaucratic fiat, there has been an end run around both the people and the Constitution.”

Sowell goes on to lay the blame for such flippancy toward the Constitution at the feet of the self-styled Progressives of the early 20th century and their heirs who thought the Founders lived in a less complicated time and the Constitution should be a “living” document subject to reinterpretation by the wiser, learned minds of the judiciary.

Sowell quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who cited a "a shifting of our longing from legal justice to social justice."

Social justice, where have we heard that phrase?

Sowell also quoted Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound who said the law should be "in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public."

Not “we the people,” but those who know better than mere voters and their duly elected representatives. You know, the bureaucrats, the judges, the Progressives who don’t need any Constitution or rules or laws, just their unerring sense of social justice.