Welcome back to Gray Matters, the podcast of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the study of the

administrative state. I'm J. Slington, the Center's Policy and Strategy Director.

Today's guest is Professor Christopher

Jay Walker. His recent paper on Congress and the Shifting Sands and Administrative Law is particularly

well-timed. You can find a link to that paper and other related works in our show notes.

Chris, welcome back to Gray Matters. Yeah, it's great to be here.

So one thing you predicted in this

paper is that the recent judicial checks on the administrative state are not enough to fix

congressional dysfunction. And so far, it looks like your prediction's right. I mean, we're recording

this the same week that the government has shut down again. But before we get into the specifics,

I kind of want to start with your conclusion.

Can you talk about the different approaches that conservatives and libertarians have taken to this anti-administrativist approach that the court's been taking?

Yeah, I mean, so I think the story, you know, I think the story on the left is that the Supreme Court is anti-administrativists

and they want to just shut down to the federal government entirely. And one story on the right is

that Justice Gorsuch is just trying to make Congress great again, right? By making it so hard for

agencies to do stuff, Congress is going to have to step back in and give agencies more express and confined power.

And when I try to do in this paper is kind of say, you know what, I think both of them are like partly true,

but the narrative I see coming out of the Supreme Court's recent precedence is actually like that the court is trying to push back on the president,

on over-presidentialism, I don't know if like, maybe the, the audience is, this is too old, right? But like, I remember the big second term of the Obama administration. You had this, uh, Saturday Night Live did this, how a bill does not become a law. skit. I don't, do you remember this one?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, so this was like President Obama was elected with a pretty big mandate. He was wanted to enact the Dreamers Act, which my former boss, Orrin Hatch was a co-sponsor of before. And the Republicans in the Senate basically just said, we're not going to work with you at all. Like, the first term was awful. We're not going to do anything with you. And President Obama looked around and said, well, actually, I'll just go it alone then, right? The phone-depend strategy. And you get DACA to refer to action for childhood arrivals, which is a weaker version of the Dreamers Act, you know, a pathway to permanent residence here in the United States for children who arrived as non-citizens.

And I think that's like the first example of many of like presidents going it alone without Congress

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