This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Sunday, October 8th, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How far has government moved from Democratic accountability?

It's a big question question and it doesn't just

implicate the feds. State governments too have drifted away from putting

elected leaders and their direct appointees in charge of writing the rules under which you and I must plan our lives.

Daniel Dew of the Pacific Legal Foundation says not all hope is lost.

We spoke in Chicago in August.

It's weird to hear people talk about the moves of the US Supreme Court of late with respect to the administrative state.

And to hear people on the left attack the Supreme Court and view them and say this is

you know this is against democracy what they're doing, like, so West Virginia, V EPA would

have been a prime example of that, where the Supreme Court essentially said that when you're dealing with major questions,

that they need to be in the hands of elected people. And it's very strange because the attack on the left in some

ways are trying to view that decision as anti-Democratic.

And it's a weird sort of paradox, because yeah,

the Supreme Court is itself not really

a democratic institution, except that they vote on things. It's not a it's not a direct

product of democracy the way legislation, how a legislation is supposed to emerge

and yet we have these big agencies

that are avowedly not democratic

that otherwise will be making these very big decisions.

Yeah, it seems like today democracy equates with,

...