South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, along with eight other states, filed a brief in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals today urging the court to end decades of federal agencies ignoring federal law by passing binding rules and regulations without public input or comment.
The Transportation Security Administration, through its “emergency powers,” sent a memorandum to all freight and railroad carriers ordering them to implement new cybersecurity measures. Congress requires agencies to go through a process called “notice and comment,” but the TSA bypassed this and imposed oppressive new obligations on railroad carriers without any public input.
“There’s an old saying that if everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency,” Attorney General Wilson said. “Too often, federal agencies try to use emergency powers to pass new rules and regulations without notice and comment, but it’s really just an effort to get around federal laws that require them to get public input.”
The brief states that “this development would’ve left the Founders astonished at the ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ that’s emerged over the last fifty years. Indeed, these agencies have blurred traditional understandings of separation of powers by exercising legislative power via promulgating regulations ‘with the force of law.’”
The attorneys general’s brief asks the Appeals Court not to allow the TSA and federal agencies to exercise their emergency powers freely unless they can specify an “actual national emergency.”
South Carolina led the brief, joined by the attorneys general from Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah.
