Worrisome …

… A Dangerous Book - Washington Free Beacon. (Hat tip[, Dave Lull.)

… the Founders were determined that the absolute power held by the Star Chamber never be allowed again. The executive branch of government must be constrained, in their view, and they wrote the Constitution with the dangers of executive power clearly in mind.

This element of the Constitution is what the modern administrative state ignores. We have now a "revival of absolute power," in exactly a way that the Founders would have understood: a use of power that stands outside the constraints of the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches laid out in the Constitution. As Hamburger writes, "Eighteenth-century Americans assumed that a rule could have the obligation of law only if it came from the constitutionally established legislature elected by the people." Twenty-first-century Americans are governed instead by unelected officials who do their own rule-making, their own enforcing, and their own judging.