It’s important to push back against the tendency of modern anti-discrimination law to trample the rights of private business and property owners to follow the dictates of their own religious scruples or other personal conscience. It’s also important to get the facts right in each of these controversies as they arise, lest we be stampeded into mistaken assumptions and alarmist misreadings. At Overlawyered, I’ve got some thoughts on the Hitching Post wedding chapel case from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which may pose dangers in both of these directions. 

Under the Bush administration, the Labor Department interpreted a piece of the Fair Labor Standards Act as exempting mortgage-loan officers from eligibility for overtime pay. The Obama Labor Department didn’t see the law the same way, however, and issued a re-interpretation.

This was a worrying development for the Mortgage Bankers Association, which represents banks that relied on the original interpretation and whose interests were greatly affected by the re-interpretation, but were given neither notice nor the chance to comment on the change. The MBA thus sued the Labor Department, arguing that the re-interpretation violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the 1946 law that determined (among other things) the processes that agencies must go through when exercising their “interpretive” and “legislative” powers—that is, when they interpret laws and when they make their own regulations.

Under the APA, agencies have to give affected parties notice and the opportunity for comment when making legislative rules, but do not have to do so when they merely make interpretive rules. The MBA argued that the APA requires an agency to go through the notice-and-comment process when it changes its interpretation of a law or regulation to such a degree that it is effectively making a legislative rule.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed with the MBA, and now the Supreme Court has decided to review the case. The government argues that agencies are due deference when they change the application of a law through interpretive rules—so long as they come in the form of an interpretation—and that the courts don’t get a say regarding when this action becomes a legislative rulemaking.

Cato disagrees with the government’s position—if there’s anything our country needs, it’s not fewer checks on the administrative state—and has filed a brief supporting the MBA, joined by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Judicial Education Network, and with former White House Counsel Boyden Gray as co-counsel. In our brief, we examine the APA’s framers’ goal of rebutting the government’s assertion of administrative power. We argue that the boundary between “interpretive” and “legislative” rules is a blurry one that should be policed by the courts. The APA’s architects assumed that the courts would play such a role; they wouldn’t have made interpretive rulemaking so procedurally easy otherwise. Scholarly sources and legislative history agree that judicial review is necessary—for example, determining when “interpretive” flip-flopping necessitates greater due-process protection—to protect those whose livelihood depends on relying on and complying with agency interpretations.

In sum, our brief looks to history to make clear a few important points that only the government would dispute. In a time when more people’s lives are staked on administrative rulings than ever before, we shouldn’t weaken the APA’s due-process protections. This case boils down to the government’s desire for agencies to more easily exercise power and for the subjects of regulations to have a harder time challenging that awesome authority. We, with the APA’s framers, think it should be the other way around.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association on December 1.

This blogpost was coauthored by Cato legal associate Julio Colomba.

Every two years, the Cato Institute awards the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to an individual who has made a significant contribution to advancing human freedom. More than anything, past winners have embodied the old adage that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

It should therefore be no surprise that Milton Friedman Prize winners continue to show up in the news, pushing for freedom and standing up to power. In recent days, three awardees have appeared in the news because of their unyielding commitment to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.

Mao Yushi

In September, the ruling Communist Party in Beijing announced that the people of Hong Kong, who have enjoyed considerable autonomy since the city’s transition from a British protectorate in 1997, could only vote for electoral candidates that were pre-approved by the Communist Party. Protesters bravely took to the streets and have faced strong-arm tactics from the police, including beatings and pepper spray. Beijing has refused to budge and this week “made its highest-level denunciation yet of the protesters,” reports the New York Times, “accusing them of pursuing a conspiracy to challenge Beijing’s power over the city.”

The authorities in Beijing aren’t satisfied with cracking down on protests in Hong Kong; they are also curtailing freedom on the mainland. Mainland supporters of the protesters are being arrested. And as the Washington Post reported this week, “books by scholars considered supporters of the demonstrations are suddenly becoming harder to find,” as Beijing imposes an apparent ban on material critical of the government.

Mao Yushi, awarded the Milton Friedman Prize in 2012, is one of those scholars. Mr. Yushi is an economist and one of China’s most outspoken activists. In response to the news that his books were being censored by Beijing, Yushi wrote, “A national government organ is daring to risk universal condemnation, in open opposition to the constitution. What is our government actually trying to do?” His internet post was then swiftly deleted by government censors.

Fortunately, Mao Yushi has overcome much worse repression. Under Mao Zedong, Yushi wrote in the Washington Post just weeks before the Hong Kong protests broke out, “I was labeled a ‘rightist’ and persecuted, along with thousands of others. We were removed from our posts and sent to the countryside for ‘re-education.’ I was reduced to the lowest human form, constantly stalked by the nightmare that I could never shake: hunger.”

Read Mao Yushi’s article in the latest issue of The Cato Journal and the corresponding Op-Ed in the Washington Post.

Hernando De Soto

The rise of ISIS, the terrorist group in Syria and Iraq, reminds Hernando De Soto of how he helped battle a radical terrorist group in Peru. And he didn’t do it with bombs. He did it through capitalism.

Hernando De Soto is a renowned economist whose work has focused on the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries. In his native Peru, De Soto helped initiate sweeping reforms that instituted property rights and a formal legal system for the country’s vast network of informal enterprises. The Peruvian government reduced the complicated red tape that was hindering economic activity by 75 percent. Hundreds of thousands of informal business were recognized and millions of jobs were created.

De Soto wrote about his efforts in two famous books, The Other Path and the Mystery of Capital. In 2004, the Cato Institute awarded him the Milton Friedman Prize.

Beyond lifting people out of grinding poverty, the reforms inspired by De Soto’s insights also undermined the violent communist guerrilla movement in Peru called The Shining Path, which had killed up to 30,000 farmers by 1990 who had “resisted being herded into mass communes.” By unleashing Peru’s untapped economic potential, the reforms effectively stole all of Shining Path’s potential recruits, directing them toward creative, wealth-producing pursuits instead. 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, De Soto urges policymakers to heed these lessons in the fight against ISIS: 

As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers—which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.

But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.

Read the whole article here.

Leszek Balcerowicz

Last month marked the 25th anniversary of what has been described as the “Polish Miracle.” Six weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall, Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s new deputy prime minister and minister of finance, “outlined a plan to transform Poland’s economy from communism to capitalism,” reported Market Watch in September. “Prices would be decontrolled, individuals allowed to start businesses, the survival of state enterprises determined by the market [and] the printing press would be shut down — halting hyperinflation…”

Balcerowicz, whom Cato Senior Fellow James Dorn described as “the architect of Poland’s transition from Soviet-style central planning to a market economy,” was awarded the Milton Friedman Prize this year. The reforms he initiated lifted the Polish people out of the poverty and misery of Soviet-style economics. From 1992–2012, Poland’s economy more than doubled in size, growing at an annual average rate of 4.42 percent.

In August, former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm and Michael Solon wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal comparing the experiences of post-Soviet Ukraine and Poland. Whereas Ukraine “largely squandered its economic potential with pervasive corruption, statist cronyism and government control,” and now faces a serious threat to its independence, “Poland created the prosperity that has strengthened and solidified its freedom and independence.” And “[t]he man largely responsible for Poland’s transformation is Leszek Balcerowicz.”

Today, the Cato Institute hosted an event on “The Transition from Communism 25 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” in which scholars explored the uneven transition from communist dictatorship to democracy and market economics, drawing lessons about which reforms worked and which did not. Balcerowicz’s historic leadership of one of the most successful of those transitions is precisely what earned him the prestigious Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Listen to his acceptance speech here.

This is big: 

As members of the faculty of Harvard Law School, we write to voice our strong objections to the Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures imposed by the central university administration…

Amid the clamor to provide fuller remedies to complainants who file sexual assault and harassment charges, the university is preparing to trample the interests of others:

Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.

Among the problems: overly broad definitions of misconduct in situations like that of mutual incapacitation by alcohol, and procedures that deny “any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing.”

Had Harvard arrived at these rules as a result of purely internal deliberations, it would be one thing. But in practice it’s yielding to strong-arm pressure from the combined efforts of the Obama Department of Justice and Education Department Office for Civil Rights (for more details, see my article for Commentary last year.) Like hundreds of other colleges and universities over the past year, Harvard responded to this pressure by meekly folding its hand: 

The university’s sexual harassment policy departs dramatically from [existing] legal principles, jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.

We recognize that large amounts of federal funding may ultimately be at stake. But Harvard University is positioned as well as any academic institution in the country to stand up for principle in the face of funding threats. 

It’s especially gratifying to see that the letter’s signers include prominent scholars associated over the years variously with feminist, liberal, and left-leaning causes, such as Nancy Gertner, Charles Ogletree, Charles Nesson, Janet Halley, and Elizabeth Bartholet, along with perhaps more expected names like longtime contrarian Alan Dershowitz. A turning point? Let’s hope so. The letter is here (h/​t Eugene Volokh).

Randy Barnett has an excellent post at the Volokh Conspiracy about his recent amicus brief requesting the D.C. Circuit grant en banc review of Sissel v. HHS. (Sound familiar?) Sissel challenges the constitutionality of ObamaCare’s individual mandate — which the Supreme Court ruled could only be constitutional if imposed under Congress’ taxing power — on the grounds that this, ahem, tax originated in the Senate rather than the House, as the Constitution’s Origination Clause requires.

A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit ruled against Sissel. The panel’s rationale was that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was not the sort of “Bill[] for raising revenue” that is subject to the Origination Clause, because the purpose of the PPACA is to expand health insurance coverage, not to raise revenue. Barnett explains why this reasoning is nutty. Under the Sissel panel’s ruling, no bills would ever be considered revenue measures because all revenue measures ultimately serve some other purpose. The panel’s interpretation would therefore effectively write the Origination Clause out of the Constitution. Barnett argues instead that the courts must recognize the PPACA as a revenue measure subject to the Origination Clause because the Supreme Court held the taxing power is the only way Congress could have constitutionally enacted that law’s individual mandate.

A shorter way to describe Barnett’s argument is that he turns ObamaCare supporters’ own victory against them: “You say the individual mandate is constitutional only as a tax? Fine. Then it’s subject to the Origination Clause.”

Barnett again corners the D.C. Circuit with another sauce-for-the-gander argument on the procedural question of whether that court should grant en banc review of its panel decision in Sissel:

Of course, en banc review is rarely granted by the DC Circuit, but given that it recently granted the government’s motion for en banc review of the statutory interpretation case of Halbig v. Burwell presumably because of the importance of the ACA, the case for correcting a mistaken constitutional interpretation is even more important, especially as the panel’s reasoning has the effect of completely gutting the Origination Clause from the Constitution…

Or, the shorter version: “You guys think Halbig is worthy of en banc review? Fine. If the Sissel panel erred, the downside is even greater.”

We’ll see whether the D.C. Circuit thinks the Constitution is as worthy of its protection as ObamaCare.

(Cross-posted at my comment-friendly blog, Darwin’s Fool.)

On October 30, the Cato Institute will host a conference featuring leading experts on four legal challenges that critics understandably yet mistakenly describe as “the most significant existential threat to the Affordable Care Act”:

Pruitt, Halbig, King & Indiana: Is ObamaCare Once Again Headed to the Supreme Court?

Thursday, October 30, 2014, 9:00AM – 1:30PM. 

Luncheon to follow.

Featuring: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt; Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller; Robert Barnes, The Washington Post; Jonathan Adler, Case Western Reserve University School of Law; David Ziff, University of Washington School of Law; Brianne Gorod, Constitutional Accountability Center; James Blumstein, Vanderbilt University; Michael F. Cannon, Cato Institute; Len Nichols, George Mason University; Tom Miller, American Enterprise Institute; and Robert Laszewski, Health Policy and Strategy Associates, LLC.

In Pruitt v. Burwell and Halbig v. Burwell, federal courts have ruled that the Internal Revenue Service is misinterpreting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, unlawfully paying billions of dollars to private health insurance companies, and unlawfully subjecting more than 50 million individuals and employers to the Act’s individual and employer mandates. In King v. Burwell, another federal court found the IRS’s interpretation is permissible. A fourth lawsuit, Indiana v. IRS, is due a ruling at any time.

While these cases attempt to uphold the ACA by challenging the Obama administration’s interpretation, supporters and critics agree they could have as large an impact on the law as any constitutional challenge. Is the IRS acting within the confines of the law? Is the ACA unworkable as written? Is it inevitable that the Supreme Court will hear one of these cases, or a similar challenge yet to be filed? What is the impact of the IRS’s (mis)interpretation? What impact would a ruling for the plaintiffs have on the health care sector and the ACA? Leading experts, including the attorneys general behind Pruitt v. Burwell and Indiana v. IRS, will discuss these and other dimensions of this litigation.

To register to attend this event, click here and then submit the form on the page that opens, or email events@​cato.​org, or fax (202) 371‑0841, or call (202) 789‑5229 by 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, October 29, 2014.

It’s not just high-profile culture-war issues like same-sex marriage and the right to bear arms that the Supreme Court is avoiding like the plague. On issues ranging from federalism to property rights to criminal law, the justices increasingly decline to hear any case they don’t absolutely have to — no matter how important the issues presented — especially if there’s a threat of an irreconcilable split. Such is the brave new world of John Roberts’s minimalism/​unanimity.

The latest such example came yesterday morning, in a criminal procedure case called Jones v. United States, in which Cato filed an amicus brief that I previously blogged about. The issue here is whether, pursuant to the Sixth Amendment, a judge can base a sentence on facts that the jury did not find beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Court ruled in a 2000 case called Apprendi v. New Jersey that judges can’t enhance sentences beyond statutory maximums based on facts, other than prior convictions, not decided by the jury — but in Jones the sentences in question, while seemingly harsh and unreasonable, were still within the sentencing guidelines.)

While normally we don’t know what the justices are thinking when they deny a cert petition, or even how the vote went (four votes are needed to grant), but in the Jones denial, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a rare dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Here’s the salient bit:

The Sixth Amendment, together with the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, “requires that each element of a crime” be either admitted by the defendant, or “proved to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt.” Any fact that increases the penalty to which a defendant is exposed constitutes an element of a crime, and “must be found by a jury, not a judge.” We have held that a substantively unreasonable penalty is illegal and must be set aside. It unavoidably follows that any fact necessary to prevent a sentence from being substantively unreasonable—thereby exposing the defendant to the longer sentence—is an element that must be either admitted by the defendant or found by the jury. It may not be found by a judge. [emphasis original; internal citations omitted.]

And so the petitioners came one vote short. The three dissenters may seem like an unusual grouping, but actually these justices are often together on issues relating criminal defendants’ jury-trial rights. (It’s sort of the left/​right versus the center, or the principled versus the pragmatic.) They were in the Apprendi majority, for example, as well as in the majority for the case that struck down the mandatory nature of the sentencing guidelines, United States v. Booker (2005), and recent cases involving the right to confront witnesses against you. Alas, they were joined in those cases by Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, who have since been replaced by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, respectively. It’s not a big surprise that Kagan seems to have joined the “prgamatic” bloc for these purposes, but Sotomayor’s vote is disappointing. Some commentators point to her background as a prosecutor to explain such deference, but Justice Sotomayor is one of the most pro-defendant votes on Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus cases.

In any event, whatever the reason for the lack of a crucial fourth vote to grant, this was another opportunity lost by the Court, another responsibility shirked. For more commentary, see here, here, here, and here.