Dr. Ronald Pestritto

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40 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr. Ronald Pestritto’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Charlie Kirk Show · Another Promise Kept: Abolishing the Department of Education · 20 Mar 2025 podcast

The case of Humphrey's executor was about the question of whether or not Congress could create an agency like the FTC, but protect it from presidential control. And the way in which principally it is protected from presidential control is by the president not being allowed to remove the commissioners whenever he likes. And that was challenged in the 1930s.

FDR tried to remove Mr. Humphreys, who was a pre-New Deal commissioner. And the court came in and said, no, Congress can, uh, when it wants to create independence for these agencies, it can carve out a special zone of protection from presidential control. And of course the obvious problem with that is, well, uh, where are they if they're not in the executive branch?

The president has the executive power according to our constitution. And so if they're not controlled by the elected executive, then by whom are they controlled? And so for years, constitutionalists have really wanted to get the court to look anew at the Humphreys executive precedent. And the good news is it's pretty clear if you follow the jurisprudence over the last several years,

the court is pretty sympathetic with the so-called unitary understanding of the executive that I'm describing, that the president has this power under Article II. You can't limit his removal of executive branch officials this way.

Humphrey's executor, I've said many times, perhaps other than Dred Scott, is probably the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court in terms of its historical ignorance and constitutional incompetence. So I think there's going to be a sympathetic audience, quite frankly, at the Supreme Court. They've gone just up to the edge in thinking about repealing Humphreys in the past.

And the Trump administration, they clearly know that. And so they are trying to tee this up as best they can, where even the more incrementalist justices on the court, they're going to have a hard time evading the issue, I think.

Well, the book chronicles how we got to the place that that we currently are. So people might wonder, you know, we were we were talking about the the FTC and the Humphreys executive decision. People might wonder, well, why is it that Congress would have wanted to kind of wall off an agency and protect it and apparently make it make it unaccountable.

And the story of how that happened and what an incredible departure that is from the original Republican vision of our founders really goes through the progressive era, the original progressive era, back to the likes of Woodrow Wilson, especially, and also folks like like Teddy Roosevelt.

And so what I try to do in the book is to say, all right, all of this, all of these developments today, these rogue agencies, the fact that you have hundreds of thousands of people governing us and they go on doing it regardless of election, elections come and go and the administrative state just sort of chugs on. Well, that didn't just happen. It wasn't just in the last five years or 10 years.

It's been a project underway in this country for a hundred years. It goes back even into the end of the 19th century. And so the book basically traces the very different arguments about the purpose of government, the great critique of the Constitution, the progressive argument that

hey, the time of the founding is past and we gotta get some new ideas here, traces that into what they did then to institutions in the 1930s and how the law changed and how we ended up here, you and I today talking about, why can't the president go ahead, he's elected after all by majority of the country, why can't he go ahead and control other people in the executive branch? How did we get here?

And so the short version is the book tries to tell that story.

Well, what they did, Charlie, was they imported a philosophy of government that was a real novelty to America. American government, as you know very well, was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The point of government is to secure the God-given rights that individuals have. And government by consent of the governed is the only legitimate form of government. Well,

What the progressives argued was that that was perhaps an appropriate way of thinking for the late 18th century, but that we had now been presented with a whole new host of problems, economic problems, social problems. The old principles were inadequate for the crisis that they faced when they came on the scene in the latter part of the 19th century.

And so the dominant philosophy, to get at your question, the dominant philosophy was that of the German state. Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote very admiringly of the bureaucratic system of government in Bismarck's Prussia and wondered how we might bring that kind of government by expertise, not government by consent, but government by expertise. Consent gets in the way.

Ordinary consent gets in the way. People have different opinions and they want their interests to be respected. Much better, the progressives argued, if we could just bring in a kind of scientific elite. And often when I – I've been doing this for longer than I want to admit –

And often when I used to bring it up, people's eyes would kind of glaze over, talking about the Germans and bureaucracy and state theory and so on. Until we got COVID, until we got told basically that, hey, elected people should get out of the way. We need the experts. We need to do whatever Tony Fauci and his minions tell us. And all of a sudden it became very real for people.

And so that was a kind of renewed appreciation of what happens when you see too much of government by consent.

Thanks for having me on, Charlie. Good to see you.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.

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