Another small step was taken last week on the steep and winding ascent back to constitutional norms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second-most important court, did its judicial duty by reprimanding Congress for abandoning constitutional propriety. The court declared unconstitutional the unprecedented independence that Congress conferred on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
This legal skirmish about one aspect of this one tentacle of the administrative state may seem recondite and trivial. It concerns, however, two momentous matters. One is the integrity of the federal government’s Madisonian architecture. The other is something that not even the prescient James Madison could have anticipated — Congress’s modern eagerness to diminish itself.
