Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Prairie Fire - The 1966 California Gubernatorial Election
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Nov. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
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Prairie fire: The 1966 California gubernatorial election
Written by John Phelan | November 1, 2026
In 1964, Barry Goldwater seized the Republican Party for the conservative cause and led it to a historic defeat. In New York City in 1965, William F. Buckley challenged the Republican Party for the conservative cause and, likewise, went down to defeat. A choice, not an echo, had twice been offered and rejected.
... Show Full Article
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Nov. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
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Prairie fire: The 1966 California gubernatorial election
Written by John Phelan | November 1, 2026
In 1964, Barry Goldwater seized the Republican Party for the conservative cause and led it to a historic defeat. In New York City in 1965, William F. Buckley challenged the Republican Party for the conservative cause and, likewise, went down to defeat. A choice, not an echo, had twice been offered and rejected.In California, on November 8, 1966, the voters would finally choose conservatism.
I'm a Believer
Ronald Reagan was born in a small Illinois town in 1911 to an alcoholic father who moved the family around regularly. "Our family didn't exactly come from the wrong side of the tracks," Reagan's brother recalled, "but we were certainly always within sound of the train whistles." An athletic youth, Reagan attended a small college where he "got some scholarship help," his football coach remembered, "but mostly worked his way through school by waiting on tables, washing windows and raking lawns. He was ambitious and determined. Nobody was paying the bills for him." He became a sports radio announcer in Iowa before heading to Hollywood to try it as an actor; Reagan became "the Errol Flynn of the B's," as he described it. "I was as brave as Errol, but in a low-budget fashion." In the years before World War Two, he had some success in movies like "Knute Rockne" and "King's Row," but his career stalled after the war.
Reagan was a typical New Deal Democrat. "President Truman knows the value of a man like Hubert Humphrey," he said in a radio ad for the Minneapolis mayor's senatorial campaign in 1948. "While Ball [Humphrey's Republican opponent] is the banner carrier for Wall Street," Reagan continued, "Mayor Humphrey is fighting for all the principles advocated by President Truman: for adequate low-cost housing; for civil rights; for prices people can afford to pay; and for a labor movement free of the Taft-Hartley Law."
But Reagan was growing increasingly anti-communist. He remained a registered Democrat until 1962 - Humphrey, after all, was a staunch anti-Communist and dedicated cold warrior - but during the 1950s, his dislike of communism's strangling of individual freedom broadened into a critique of "Big Government" generally, including in the United States. This argument matured as he traveled around the country giving and honing a speech which captured the views of the growing conservative movement, and he began to find political controversy. "One night [in October 1957, Reagan] was scheduled to speak in St. Paul, Minnesota, at an assembly at Central High School," Lee Edwards wrote.
"But when he arrived he was greeted by the news that the Teachers Federation had passed a resolution the night before demanding that Ronald Reagan not be allowed to address the students because he was a "controversial personality."..."
"That morning Reagan stepped out onto the stage of the high school auditorium not knowing how the students would react. He needn't have worried. They gave him a five-minute standing ovation. "They damn well didn't want someone telling them," Reagan says, "whom they could or couldn't listen to."
"The next night in Minneapolis, just across the river, where Reagan was the banquet speaker, a St. Paul teacher asked to say a few words to the audience. He proceeded to make a public apology on behalf of the St. Paul teachers for the anti-Reagan resolution. Reagan later learned from a reporter that only a handful of teachers out of a membership of 1200 had attended the meeting at which the resolution was passed."
Reagan campaigned for Goldwater, and when he gave his speech on television on October 27, 1964, he became a bigger star in politics than he had been in the movies. "A Time for Choosing" was, the Washington Post's David Broder wrote, "the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with his 'Cross of Gold' speech." In the new year, Reagan took the political plunge and decided to run for governor of California in 1966.
His opponent in the primary was former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher. Using the playbook used by Nelson Rockefeller - unsuccessfully, it must be said - against Goldwater, Christopher's campaign sought to paint Reagan as a right-wing extremist in contrast to their man, who was, Senator Kuchel put it, "one who represents Republicans in the Lincoln tradition and the Eisenhower tradition." This cut little ice with voters, however, and in desperation, Christopher switched to attacking Reagan for being a closet leftist, citing his former membership of Americans for Democratic Action and United World Federalists. "Did he jointly sponsor protest on U.S. atomic policies with the chairman of the Communist Party in Los Angeles?" Christopher mused. Nothing worked. In June's primary, Reagan won a resounding victory, scoring two votes for every one that Christopher won.
Solitary Man
The incumbent, Democrat Edmund "Pat" Brown, might have welcomed this. In 1958 and 1962, he had beaten Republicans -- William Knowland and Richard Nixon, respectively -- whose political reputations were built on anti-communism, and it was generally thought among the commentariat that Reagan would go the same way. "We thought the notion was absurd," Brown later wrote, "and rubbed our hands in gleeful anticipation of beating this politically inexperienced, right-wing extremist and aging actor."
But, as a Minnesotan had recently sung, "the times they were a-changin'." What prominent liberal Joe Rauh called "the liberal-labor-Negro coalition that had elected every liberal president and made possible every liberal advance since the 1930s" was beginning to crack. An early sign came in California, where, the day Lyndon Johnson won 59 percent of the state's vote for president, Proposition 14 -- which overturned the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, thereby allowing property sellers, landlords, and their agents to openly discriminate on ethnic grounds when selling or letting accommodations -- passed with 65 percent of the vote. Liberalism, the use of government to achieve social ends, had peaked with Johnson's election, but a peak is not only the culmination of ascent but the beginning of a descent, and this had begun with Proposition 14. Brown had risen on Rauh's coalition and, as it broke apart, he fell between the cracks.
Brown faced a tough primary challenge from conservative Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, darling of the Democrats' blue-collar base. Yorty lambasted Brown's "indecisiveness and monumental incompetence" and said, "The Democratic voters deserve to have an alternative to the mercenary, corrupt, left-wing, entrenched Brown machine." Brown hit Yorty as a "cruel, cruel man" and "a renegade." Brown triumphed, but by a ratio of 1.4 votes to 1, his appeal to the labor element of Rauh's coalition waning.
For What It's Worth
In California, students led the break by liberals. In 1961, Brown had condemned the "misguided weltschmerz for cultural unity" and argued, "Against it, our colleges must throw their entire weight--and students must join the battle. Far from discouraging your students' social and public interests," he urged administrators, "I propose that you positively exploit them."
"Here is an honorable source of college spirit; here is a worthy unifying and organizing principle for your whole campus life. I say: Thank God for the spectacle of students picketing-even when they are picketing me at Sacramento and I think they are wrong-for students protesting and freedom-riding, for students listening to society's dissidents, for students going out into the fields with our migratory workers, and for marching off to jail with our segregated Negroes. At last, we're getting somewhere. The colleges have become boot camps for citizenship--and citizen-leaders are marching out of them. For a while, it will be hard on us administrators. Some students are going to be wrong, and some people will deny them the right to make mistakes. Administrators will have to wade through the angry letters and colleges will lose some donations. We Governors will have to face indignant caravans and elected officials bent on dictating to state college facilities."
"But let us stand up for our students and be proud of them. If America is still on the way up, it will welcome this new impatient, critical crop of young gadflies. It will be fearful only of the complacent and passive."
In late 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, took Brown at his word. When administrators banned political activity on campus, some students disobeyed, and campus police moved to arrest them. Student activists brought the university to a halt. "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part!" Mario Savio, a protest leader, bellowed.
"And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels...upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
These histrionics played badly with the average Californian.
Brown eventually initiated the largest mass arrest in state history to bring the chaos to an end but was trapped by his previous statements. So, in the meantime, he was reduced to waffling when asked to adjudicate between university leaders and students. "[A]s to who's right in the last analysis I can't say," he explained. "Emotions rise in situations like this and each side thinks they are absolutely right. But one side can't unilaterally set themselves up as sole custodians of what's right and wrong."
Reagan, by contrast, could be clearer. "We've had a great university built by the people of California, cheerfully and willingly, and I'm sure many of them built it with a dream that they were creating a great opportunity perhaps denied to them in their youth, but for their children," he said. "And now they see many of their own children denied admittance because of a lack of space while that same great university has been brought to its knees and humiliated by a neurotic, dissident minority." The chaos was "the fruit of appeasement," he charged. "The time to have stopped it was when the students first blocked a police car on the campus. The administration should have taken the leaders by the scruff of their necks and kicked them out, and it should have put the rest of them back to work doing their homework."
As the war in Vietnam ramped up in 1965 and 1966, so did student protests against it, and this would be a running sore for Brown's campaign.
Summer in the City
If liberals thought the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964 and the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, would usher in a new era of racial harmony, they were disabused just five days later.
"Around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11, 1965," Matthew Dallek writes:
"...a white California Highway patrolman named Lee Minkus received a tip from a motorist that a black youth was driving drunk through the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Minkus spotted the driver, Marquette Frye, and promptly placed him under arrest. It was a scorching summer evening, and residents who had been standing on porches and milling outside their homes flocked to the scene. Frye's brother Ronald, who had witnessed the arrest, ran home to tell his mother what had happened. Mrs. Frye arrived on the scene and scolded her son for drinking, when a seemingly routine arrest suddenly morphed into a major confrontation between black and police."
"While she was haranguing him, Marquette pushed his mother away and moved toward the small crowd that had gathered around him, swearing and shouting that if the officers wanted to jail him they would have to kill him first. Soon, the crowd numbered about 250, and more police came to the scene to keep the situation in hand. Their presence, however, accomplished the opposite. Residents resented the heavy police presence in their neighborhood, and when one woman spat on an officer trying to keep order, the officer waded into a sea of black faces, plucked the offender from the crowd, and placed her under arrest. Rumors now flew that police had abused a pregnant woman and that the Fryes had also been handled roughly. Riled up by rumors and by the police, residents began throwing rocks at police cruisers that were now leaving the area in an attempt to calm residents. With the police gone, rioters turned on random passers-by, stomped cars, and dragged white drivers from their cars and beat them."
So began the Watts Riots, which would eventually claim 34 lives over five days, America's worst urban riots since the New York City draft riots of 1863.
Here, too, Brown was trapped. He had invested large amounts of political capital in passing the Rumford Act, arguing that it was a necessary measure to help the black community. Now, he was reduced to pleading that candidates avoid the issue "because it is the toughest domestic issue that we have had probably in the last 25 years." Reagan, once again, was able to be blunter. With the murder rate up 18 percent in six years, rape 29 percent, and burglaries 35 percent, he claimed, "Our city streets are jungle paths after dark with more crimes of violence than New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts combined." To the charge that he was exploiting a "white backlash," Reagan replied that it was "a backlash against what seems to be a breakdown in law and order."
Good Vibrations
If these issues were political poison for Brown, they also required Reagan to add new colors to his political palette. "A Time for Choosing" had woven together anti-communism and a libertarian critique of the federal government, but as a candidate for office, Reagan now had to take stands on less philosophical issues like the universities and crime. Remembered for the sunny optimism of "Morning in America," Reagan's vision of politics is often contrasted with Richard Nixon's darker one, but that came later. The Reagan who won in California in 1966 debuted many of the themes which would take Nixon to the White House in 1968.
Brown hit Reagan's inexperience. "[S]uch Democrats as Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Gene Kelly, Dan Blocker, and John Forsythe appeared on television and radio," Lee Edwards wrote, "all uttering variations on this theme: 'I could play a governor in a movie, but I don't have the ability to be one.'" But such attacks played into Reagan's "citizen politician" shtick. "As I have stated, I am not a politician in the sense of ever having held public office," Reagan admitted.
"But I just happen to have a deep-seated belief that it is high time that some of the people from the rank-and-file citizenry should involve themselves in government so that it will be a government of and by, as well as for, the people. And feeling that way, I think I can qualify as a citizen-politician and I don't believe that the country was created by men who were politicians."
With the electorate's mood against incumbents, this was smart politics. On a visit to California to campaign for Brown, Vice President Humphrey, his Midwestern populist's antennae twitching, "instructed aides to strike from his prepared speech two full pages of wisecracks about Reagan, based on his movie roles and brief experience in politics," Edwards wrote. Jack Palance stormed off a Brown telethon in response to such attacks; "Attack him if you wish for lack of experience," the Shane star argued, "but don't go after him just because he's an actor."
So, Brown reached for the playbook that Lyndon Johnson had deployed against Barry Goldwater: calling Reagan a fascist. One day, Reagan was "one of the most dangerous right-wing candidates this country has ever seen"; the next the John Birch Society were "the storm troopers" of Reagan's "drive for governor." "You know, I'm running against an actor," Brown told a black schoolgirl in one TV spot, "and you know who it was who shot Abe Lincoln, don't you?" Reagan deplored this as "Extreme phraseology from one who professes to deplore extremism."
Brown's barrel scraping wasn't loud enough to drown out the reality faced by Californians. Journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that the "Birch issue indeed is dead...Polls taken by both camps showed Californians--particularly the 60 per cent of the state's population that lives in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties in Southern California--couldn't care less about the John Birch Society or right-wing extremism. What bothers them much more is the Negro revolution and high taxes."
California's population had boomed during World War Two and, with much of its economy in "new" industries, its electorate was more "white-collar" than those that elected Charles Stenvig in Minneapolis or Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia. But the residents of those Southern California suburbs were Tom Joad's children, the memory of the family jalopy ride west in search of opportunity -- Reagan's journey -- only a generation hence. They had built a society hailed at the conclusion of the 1962 epic "How the West Was Won" and in records by the Beach Boys as the pinnacle of American civilization, and they wanted to keep it that way. "Our research showed us that anywhere from one to two election cycles they would get up in the morning and say, 'This isn't the Democratic Party I know,'" a Reagan adviser said, "for any number of philosophical reasons." "We could see it developing in South Gate, Torrance, and some portions of Orange County, where there were deep pockets of blue-collar laborers," he continued. "And we knew Pat Brown was going to have a hell of a time with them." Reagan even made a play for the Mexican American vote, plastering his campaign slogan -- "Ya Basta?" -- on bumper stickers.
Shapes of Things
On Election Day, Reagan won nearly 1 million more votes than Brown and 55 of California's 58 counties. Notably, he scored well in working-class areas; the "Reagan Democrats" had been born.
"We can start a prairie fire that will sweep the nation," Reagan said, and, fourteen years later, it would sweep him to the White House. By then, the continued explosions of crime and welfare spending, the shock of Watergate, the painful humiliations of Vietnam and the Iran hostage crisis, and the misery of Stagflation would convince many Americans that Reagan was right when he said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'" Reagan held to his conservative principles until enough Americans came to share them, and that laid the basis for two decades of conservative governance starting with his election in 1980. The age of Reagan had begun.
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John Phelan is an Economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
john.phelan@americanexperiment.org
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Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/prairie-fire-the-1966-california-gubernatorial-election/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Even Sen. Klobuchar Admits Minnesota is a "mess"
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Nov. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
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Even Sen. Klobuchar admits Minnesota is a "mess"
Written by John Phelan | November 2, 2026
Back in May, I noted that:
Starting in March 2019, our Thinking Minnesota Poll has occasionally asked:
"Generally speaking, would you say that things in Minnesota are going in the right direction, or have they gotten off on the wrong track?"
"The first time we asked that question, as Figure 1 shows, 57% of respondents
... Show Full Article
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Nov. 3 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
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Even Sen. Klobuchar admits Minnesota is a "mess"
Written by John Phelan | November 2, 2026
Back in May, I noted that:
Starting in March 2019, our Thinking Minnesota Poll has occasionally asked:
"Generally speaking, would you say that things in Minnesota are going in the right direction, or have they gotten off on the wrong track?"
"The first time we asked that question, as Figure 1 shows, 57% of respondentssaid "Right direction" and 38% said "Wrong track." Over the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, this flipped and in June 2021, "Wrong track" was up three points on "Right direction." As our subsequent polling -- and that of others such as St. Cloud State University and the America First Policy Institute -- shows, that gap has only widened. Indeed, the last time we polled this question in February 2026, just 27% of respondents said that Minnesota is going in the "Right direction" and 65% said our state is on the "Wrong track" -- that is 2 to 1 for "Wrong track." Minnesotans would not be saying this if they truly felt that the state of their state was strong."
Figure 1: Generally speaking, would you say that things in Minnesota are going in the right direction, or have they gotten off on the wrong track?
In September, my colleague, Bill Walsh, wrote that:
"Fifty-five percent of respondents to the latest Thinking Minnesota Poll said the state is moving in the wrong direction. Only 36 percent believe the state is heading in the right direction."
One of the strangest things about this election cycle is how, after sixteen years of DFL control of the executive branch -- in two of which the party also controlled the state House and Senate in the "historic" trifecta -- this sentiment appears to be shared by the party's candidate to replace disgraced Governor Tim Walz: "I'm going to clean up this mess," Senator Klobuchar says in one of her TV spots.
What "mess" would that be? Who caused it?
We at Center of the American Experiment stand ready to get to work cleaning it up.
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John Phelan is an Economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
john.phelan@americanexperiment.org
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Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/even-sen-klobuchar-admits-minnesota-is-a-mess/
[Category: ThinkTank]
The Buckeye Institute Urges SCOTUS to Protect Rights of New York's Amish Community
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 2 [Category: Think Tank] -- The Buckeye Institute, an independent research and educational institution that says its mission is to advance free-market public policy, posted the following news release:
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The Buckeye Institute Urges SCOTUS to Protect Rights of New York's Amish Community
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Columbus, OH - On Monday, The Buckeye Institute filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to hear Miller v. McDonald. In 2019, New York state stopped allowing religious exemptions to its state vaccine mandate, something it had allowed for more than 50 years,
... Show Full Article
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 2 [Category: Think Tank] -- The Buckeye Institute, an independent research and educational institution that says its mission is to advance free-market public policy, posted the following news release:
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The Buckeye Institute Urges SCOTUS to Protect Rights of New York's Amish Community
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Columbus, OH - On Monday, The Buckeye Institute filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to hear Miller v. McDonald. In 2019, New York state stopped allowing religious exemptions to its state vaccine mandate, something it had allowed for more than 50 years,even for children who attend private Amish schools.
"For hundreds of years, the Amish have eschewed modern worldly influences, including modern medicine. It is a core part of their religious beliefs and a right that the U.S. Constitution protects," said David C. Tryon, director of litigation at The Buckeye Institute.
In its brief, The Buckeye Institute argues that lower courts have misread Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 Supreme Court decision that upheld a $5 fine for refusing a smallpox vaccine, as giving governments nearly free rein whenever they invoke public health. The brief points out that the court later relied on that same decision to justify forced sterilization in the infamous Buck v. Bell, a warning about how far Jacobson's reasoning can be stretched. The Buckeye Institute asks the court to clarify that health laws must respect religious freedom and parents' rights and may not favor nonreligious exemptions over religious ones.
First Liberty Institute represents the Amish families in Miller v. McDonald.
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Original text here: https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/research/detail/the-buckeye-institute-urges-scotus-to-protect-rights-of-new-yorks-amish-community
Prediction Markets and the Problem of Calling Elections
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The American Action Forum issued the following news release:
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Prediction Markets and the Problem of Calling Elections
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Prediction markets can complement traditional polling by aggregating dispersed expectations and incorporating new information, but their reliability depends on a range of factors. In a new insight, Director of Financial Services Policy Thomas Kingsley discusses the strengths and weaknesses of prediction markets and how they differ from traditional polls.
He concludes:
Only 25 percent of Americans trust political polling. Similarly,
... Show Full Article
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The American Action Forum issued the following news release:
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Prediction Markets and the Problem of Calling Elections
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Prediction markets can complement traditional polling by aggregating dispersed expectations and incorporating new information, but their reliability depends on a range of factors. In a new insight, Director of Financial Services Policy Thomas Kingsley discusses the strengths and weaknesses of prediction markets and how they differ from traditional polls.
He concludes:
Only 25 percent of Americans trust political polling. Similarly,prediction markets can improve election forecasting, but they are not oracles, and the lessons of 2016, 2024, and the Vatican converge: National totals are not state outcomes, thin markets can sound more certain than the evidence warrants, and no price can reflect what its traders cannot know. The evidence on calibration is nonetheless encouraging, since markets have so far been reasonably candid about how often they are likely to be wrong. The harder question is whether they tell analysts anything that polling has not already said, and answering it requires comparable forecast records together with a regulatory framework that polices the trading without foreclosing the evidence. The CFTC's proposed rule and enforcement actions speak to the second requirement but not the first. Until the data accumulate, claims that markets have made pollsters obsolete remain premature; markets have earned a seat at the table, but not yet the head of it.
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Original text here: https://www.americanactionforum.org/press-release/prediction-markets-and-the-problem-of-calling-elections/
Arizona's Administrative State Laid an Egg
PHOENIX, Arizona, Nov. 2 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Goldwater Institute posted the following news:
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Arizona's Administrative State Laid an Egg
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An Arizona judge this morning struck down the state's controversial "cage-free egg rule" in a lawsuit brought on behalf of consumers and restaurant owners by the Goldwater Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation. That rule--which required all eggs sold in Arizona be from "cage free" hens--was adopted in 2022 by Hobbs administration bureaucrats in an effort to prevent voters from having a say on the question. But shortly after the rule was
... Show Full Article
PHOENIX, Arizona, Nov. 2 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Goldwater Institute posted the following news:
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Arizona's Administrative State Laid an Egg
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An Arizona judge this morning struck down the state's controversial "cage-free egg rule" in a lawsuit brought on behalf of consumers and restaurant owners by the Goldwater Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation. That rule--which required all eggs sold in Arizona be from "cage free" hens--was adopted in 2022 by Hobbs administration bureaucrats in an effort to prevent voters from having a say on the question. But shortly after the rule wasadopted, Gov. Katie Hobbs began postponing its implementation, due the fact that it would have significantly increased food prices throughout the state. The egg rule remains a prime example of administrative state overreach.
When the Arizona Department of Agriculture adopted the rule, they weren't deterred by the fact that the people's elected representatives never created or even considered such an idea. On the contrary, the department claimed it could act under a law that gives the agency power to "adopt rules for poultry husbandry and the production of eggs"--language so broad that it would seem to enable the agency to do whatever it likes.
That's a problem, because such a broad grant of power violates the constitutional principle that laws must be made by the legislature, not by unelected bureaucrats. What's more, five years ago, the Goldwater Institute helped write and pass HB 2599, a pathbreaking new limit on administrative power in Arizona, which says that agencies may not "make a rule that is not specifically authorized by statute." A statute that lets bureaucrats "adopt rules for poultry husbandry and the production of eggs" is general, not specific. So, using HB 2599, we went to court on behalf of restauranteur Grant Krueger, arguing that the egg rule is not "specifically authorized."
And in today's ruling, the Maricopa County Superior Court agreed: "'Specific,'" it declared, "generally means...explicit or tending to specify. 'Authorized' generally means...permitted or directed or possessed of authority. [So]...the language of the statute must...be specific enough to suggest that the Legislature contemplated or anticipated the mandates or standards in the proposed rule. [Yet] the statute on which [the Department] relies, A.R.S. SS 3-710(J), is...so broad and vague that it could be used to authorize nearly any rule."
Today's ruling is not only a win for businesses and consumers in Arizona, but a superb example of how the administrative state--perhaps the single largest threat to constitutional democracy in this country--can be reined in. Bureaucratic agencies too often exercise the legislative, executive, and judicial powers together, in violation of one of our most important constitutional principles, in order to write rules that have the force of the law--even though the employees of these agencies have never been elected by the people. And it's not just questions about food production--which are important enough. Virtually every aspect of our lives today is touched in some manner by the power of the administrative state. That threatens to turn our free society into what we call the Permission Society--in which the individual has no rights, but only permissions, and must ask the government "mother may I?" for every act in his or her life.
But there is a better way. Arizona's "specifically authorized" requirement is just one of the many ways the Goldwater Institute has pioneered for making these agencies accountable to the people once again. Along with our Permit Freedom legislation, our Right to Earn a Living law, our Judicial Deference Reform Act, and other legislation--all of which have been, or are being adopted by states across the country--we have shown that states do have it within their power to push back against administrative overreach.
You can read today's ruling here and learn more about our work on the problem of the administrative state here.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.
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Original text here: https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/arizonas-administrative-state-laid-an-egg/
