Our Founders Understood That Men Are Not Angels, and We Disregard That Insight at Our Peril When …

A nicely crafted passage from Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence defending of the “major questions doctrine” (the principle that “ambiguous language” in a statute shouldn’t be seen as delegating “highly consequential power” to the Executive Branch, even if it can be read as delegating lesser power) in today’s tariffs case. And here are the two following sentences:

We delude ourselves, too, if we think that power will accumulate safely and only in the hands of dispassionate “people … found in agencies.” Even if unelected agency officials were uniquely immune to the desire for more power (an unserious assumption), they report to elected Presidents who can claim no such modesty.