Censorship, Guns, and Administrative Power: Mark Chenoweth Explains 3 Major SCOTUS Cases

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “It’s not the government’s job to police the line between true speech and false speech. The Constitution doesn’t give our government that power. The government has the power to police the line between lawful speech and unlawful speech.”

Mark Chenoweth is the president and chief legal officer of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan civil rights group dedicated to protecting constitutional freedoms from government violations.

“Most people aren’t going to know why their speech was taken down off of the platform. They might assume that it was the private decision of Facebook, or X, or LinkedIn … and it’s difficult to discover that it was actually the result of a government order,” says Mr. Chenoweth.

In this episode, we dive into the NCLA’s three lawsuits that have made their way up to the Supreme Court: Murthy v. Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v. Biden), Garland v. Cargill, and Relentless v. Dept. of Commerce.

“Agencies no longer look at the statute and say, ‘How do we best interpret this statute and apply it?’ Instead, they say, ‘How far can we push this and still get federal judges to go along with our ‘reasonable interpretation of the statute’?’ Well, that’s not a good dynamic to have in place. We need to get back to a world in which the agencies expect the judges to enforce the law as Congress wrote it,” says Mr. Chenoweth.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Mark Chenoweth, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Mark Chenoweth:
Good to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Most of our viewers have heard about Missouri v. Biden. This is one of three cases you have in front of the Supreme Court with the New Civil Liberties Alliance [NCLA]. Please give us an outline of the Missouri v. Biden case. Let’s do that for each of the cases, just a quick thumbnail and why it’s significant.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Let me review these in reverse order. The last case of the term for us is the Murthy v. Missouri case. It was called Missouri v. Biden in a lower court. This is the case in which we had obtained an injunction against the administration over all of the social media censorship that it has been engaged in. This is about multiple agencies of the federal government telling X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn and some of these other social media platforms to take particular ideas and individuals off of those platforms. Then those companies are complying because of the pressure that they were put under by the administration in these cases.

The second case that we just argued in the Supreme Court is Garland v. Cargill. This is another one that we won in a lower court and has to do with the bump stock ban. This is a case where bump stocks had been ruled legal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms [ATF] under the Bush administration. The Obama administration had multiple rulings on this. There were also rulings at the beginning of the Trump administration. After the massacre in Las Vegas, where bump stocks were used, the ATF wanted to outlaw them. But instead of going through Congress, as they should have done, the agency just outlawed them on its own. That’s the problem we have, and we’re taking that issue up to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is this relevant to your third case as well?

Mr. Chenoweth:
Our third case has to do with deference to administrative agencies. There were actually two cases argued. Ours is called Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. The other case was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, who is the Secretary of the Department of Commerce. The issue in both cases is whether or not a federal judge has to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.

That is a very important issue when there’s an ambiguity. Under the deference doctrine called Chevron, if the agency’s interpretation is reasonable, then a judge has to defer to that. Our view is that if you’re suing an agency or an agency is suing you, then you need to have a fair judge, not a judge who’s deferring to the agency’s view of the law.

Mr. Jekielek:
For over 40 years, the Chevron deference has created a situation where agencies are making the laws and Congress has decided that is okay.

Mr. Chenoweth:
It’s created an incentive for agencies to be more adventurous in the kinds of things that they want to get away with. The way it has been explained to me by someone at the Department of Justice who saw this particular dynamic in play, is that the agencies no longer look at the statute and ask, “How do we best interpret this statute and apply it.?” Instead, they say, “How far can we push this and still get federal judges to go along with our ‘reasonable interpretation’ of the statute?” That’s not a good dynamic to have in place. We need to get back to a world in which the agencies expect the judges to enforce the law as Congress wrote it.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of our reporters, Sam Dorman, has covered the Chevron deference. He did a long interview with Philip Hamburger at NCLA. He recently suggested that one of the justices is referring to the Chevron deference in the past tense. Are you aware of this?

Mr. Chenoweth:
I did hear about this, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
How do you interpret this?

Mr. Chenoweth:
It’s always hard to read the tea leaves. But Justice Jackson, in the oral argument in the Corner Post, Inc. case, which is not one of our cases, asked a question where she said something along the lines of, “Yes, that would be true if we had Chevron, but in a world where there isn’t Chevron anymore, how do you answer the question?”

People have looked at that and asked, “Is there a decision already circulating where Chevron would go away.” Later in the same argument, Justice Kagan started a question with, “If there isn’t Chevron anymore,” then went on with the rest of her question. Folks are looking at that and thinking it might be indicative of where the court is leaning on the Relentless and Loper Bright cases.

Mr. Jekielek:
They’re discussing that right now, and there’s an opinion being formulated. When will we know about this? This is one of the most important pieces of administrative law ever.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Marbury v. Madison is probably the most cited case. The Chevron case is the second most cited case. It has been very influential over the last 40 years, unfortunately.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance was founded in large part to try to do away with the Chevron deference doctrine. Our founder, Philip Hamburger, who you mentioned, has a very important theory about why the Chevron deference violates individual liberty. It’s not just a problem of how it creates incentives for Congress and incentives for the agency. It also violates people’s individual rights.

We wanted to get that argument in front of the justices as well. No one in the 40 years that Chevron has been on the books has ever made that argument about the violation of individual rights to the justices at the Supreme Court. We were able to do that in January and we’ll see if that made a difference.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of people are interested in these other two cases. With Missouri v. Biden, now Murthy v. Missouri, it’s hard to fathom what the world would look like if this case doesn’t work out on the side of the First Amendment.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Let’s take a step back, for those who haven’t been following what has come to light as a result of the discovery in this case. It’s not just the discovery in this case, it’s also the Twitter files that Elon Musk released. They contained a lot of information that has been useful to this litigation.

We learned that there were hundreds of instances when different agencies in the federal government went to the various platforms and directed them to take down particular kinds of speech. They even worked with them to try to change their policies on what would and wouldn’t be allowed on those platforms. Already, we are in territory that is violating the First Amendment.

The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. If you look at what abridging means, there’s the problem. It’s not a term we use that much anymore, but it means diminishing. If the administration is calling these platforms and telling them to take down certain speech, do you think that is diminishing speech on those platforms? Of course it is.

That’s the standard that the Supreme Court ought to apply. There have been many precedents built up over time about what does and doesn’t count as so-called state action. Historically, a lot of the cases that have been brought have been cases where someone was trying to show that a private entity was engaged in state action. You want to be careful before you decide that some company or some other entity is the government, because all kinds of extra obligations would apply to them at that point.

Those precedents have said there has to be a showing of coercion or pressure or significant entwinement or encouragement. These are all the legal terms that you have to demonstrate in order to show the level of state action that would then lead the First Amendment to apply. We’re not suing the platforms, they are not the defendants here. We sued the government agencies that were guilty of ordering the censorship.

The standard that ought to apply is abridging. Did they diminish speech or did they not diminish speech by these actions? It is crystal clear that these actions diminish speech. If they can get away with it, then they’ll keep doing it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since this case was launched, the discovery on this case has been riveting.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Yes. This wasn’t just some rogue actors in different agencies. This was a systematic effort on the part of the administration to tamp down on certain ideas. One of the things that they were interested in tamping down on was anyone criticizing the government’s narrative around Covid-19, or the different ways in which the government was trying to handle Covid-19, including vaccine mandates and vaccine development.

There was some of this that predated the current administration, but it really ramped up in January of 2021. One of the very first things that happened was the story that went out when Hank Aaron died, that maybe he had died soon after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. There was some of this that predated the current vaccine. Now, I haven’t run that to ground. I don’t know if that’s true, but that rumor was circulating and the administration jumped on that and they were immediately telling folks,
“Take that down. Don’t spread that story.”

The problem is that it’s not the government’s job to police the line between true speech and false speech. The Constitution doesn’t give our government that power. The government has the power to police the line between lawful speech and unlawful speech. Is there child porn up on the internet? The government can take that down because that’s unlawful. It’s illegal. You can take that down. They can tell the platforms to take that speech down.

There are lots of other kinds of illegal speech that we can think of that the government can police, but it can’t police the line between what it thinks is accurate and inaccurate. That’s just not the government’s job. Yet, this administration thinks that they can do that all over the place, not just on that, but on things like the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jan, you’ll appreciate this immediately. The things that they were often telling the platforms to take down were actually truthful. That’s a big part of the reason why we’re talking about this. That’s one of the reasons why the government can’t be in the business of policing the truth because it’s not very good at it.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to add that Missouri v. Biden was done along with the states of Louisiana and Missouri as well. Everybody should know that.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Yes. We represent four private plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but obviously the state of Louisiana represents itself, and the state of Missouri represents itself.

Mr. Jekielek:
Have you heard of the term malinformation? There is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. There’s actually a term for what you just described.

Mr. Chenoweth:
I’ve heard it explained in different ways. There’s a difference between information that is deliberately false and information that is accidentally false. That’s one of the distinctions concerning misinformation and disinformation. Then malinformation is maybe the most insidious. My understanding is that malinformation is information that they concede is true, but it’s unhelpful to them for that information to be out there.

I’m sorry that it’s inconvenient that natural immunity to Covid exists. But it’s true that if you have had Covid and you have recovered from it, you have antibodies, and it’s much harder for you to get it a second time. That was important, accurate, and truthful information. The government systematically suppressed that kind of information from being on these social media platforms.

Mr. Jekielek:
What are the implications of a class of information judged by the government to be truthful, but inconvenient?

Mr. Chenoweth:
An inconvenient truth, you might call it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain the implications, because there are multiple instances of this.

Mr. Chenoweth:
The government has a right to its own speech. There is this government speech doctrine. If the government wants to go out there on its own platforms to spread its own message, it’s welcome to do that. What it can’t do is go out there and suppress the counter-messages that other people might have or the information other people might be putting out there to question the official narrative. Yet, that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re doing it under this banner of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, as though that has anything to do with what the Constitution permits.

There is no mention of misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation in the Constitution. There have been tremendous precedents from the Supreme Court saying that it’s not the job of the government to do this, and that the people are the watchguards. The government is not the watchguard of truth.

Mr. Jekielek:
Malinformation is effectively government information, because who really decides if it’s inconvenient? The government decides. They think what they’re doing is more important and valuable than the actual true information.

Mr. Chenoweth:
The way that we arrive at truth in science and in public policy debates is to have a free flow of information where people put forward different hypotheses. If we’re going to reach the truth, some of the hypotheses that people put forward are going to be wrong. You have to have the freedom to be wrong, to say things that turn out not to be quite right. Then other people can come along and say, “OK, that piece of what you said is right, but this piece is wrong.” Then slowly, over time, you’re able to generate the truth of the situation in science or in public policy.

Mr. Jekielek:
You just described the scientific method.

Mr. Chenoweth:
That’s right, and that was not allowed to prevail in the debates around Covid-19. We were all led to believe that there was only one truth, that the government already knew it, and that all of the other information that was circulating was not true. Yet, our clients in the Murthy case include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s a professor at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard University.

These are top scientists in their field who understand epidemiology and understand the science behind these viruses. They had a different view than the prevailing government view about what we ought to do in terms of responding to the pandemic, and yet their voices were silenced.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is going to happen on March 18th?

Mr. Chenoweth:
In the Murthy case, the state of Louisiana is going to take the lead in arguing this case. We will explain to the justices that even under the standard that is prevailing that I talked about earlier with the coercion or pressure, there is plenty of evidence in this case to show that all of those things happened. The White House was telling these platforms to take certain speech down.

When it wasn’t taken down, they would call them back, sometimes the same day and ask, “How come it’s not down yet? There were also threats from the president saying, “We’re really going to have to look at Section 230 and the immunity that you guys have under Section 230 if you don’t go along with what we want to do from a censorship standpoint. There are examples of pressure, coercion, and entanglement.

But as I alluded to earlier, I don’t think that’s the right standard. It’s a much lower bar than that. Look, the reason that we were able to show in this case that all of those things happened, is because we were able to get discovery from a judge who believed this enough and there was enough evidence. The Twitter files were also helpful in this.

But if the government knows you have to show that high a bar, most people aren’t going to know why their speech was taken down off of the platform. They might assume that it was the private decision of Facebook, or X, or LinkedIn to take down their speech. It’s difficult to discover that it was actually the result of a government order.

If you survive a motion to dismiss in a lawsuit, and then you have to show that there was coercion or entanglement or encouragement, it’s going to be very difficult for an individual to show that. That would give the government way too much latitude in silencing ordinary Americans on these platforms.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re involved in a whole new case now. It’s the Daily Wire and the Federalist on one side, and the U.S. State Department on the other side. Please explain that case to us, because it’s obviously related.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Yes, it is. It’s related to this social media censorship problem. It’s the Daily Wire, the Federalist, and the state of Texas is also one of the plaintiffs. We’ve sued the State Department because this came to our attention.
This is due to some great reporting by our colleague Margot Cleveland, who also works for the Federalist, and by Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner.

We all assume the State Department is engaged in activity overseas on behalf of Americans. But in this case, the State Department was actually funding research and developing technology to promote censorship. Not only was it developing this and promoting it, it was then turning around and selling it or giving it to folks in the United States to use to suppress the speech of Americans.

This is shocking. First of all, it’s shocking that the State Department would be doing something that had a domestic focus at all, and secondly, the fact that it would use this technology. Look, there may or may not be a legitimate way to deploy this kind of technology in service of the foreign policy of the United States. I’m not a foreign policy organization and I’m not going to opine on that today.

But I know for sure that the First Amendment forbids the State Department from turning around and applying these tools in America. Not only does it have these tools, it has a test bed where it allows folks to come in and test the efficacy of these various speech-suppressing software and tools that they have developed. We have organizations like NewsGuard that are trying to demonetize some of these websites, like the Daily Wire, the Federalist, and probably the EpochTimes too. I wouldn’t be surprised.

The State Department is behind this, facilitating this, and has been using government taxpayer dollars to do this. It is unlawful. That is why we’re suing the State Department over it. Hopefully, we will be able to show to the federal court and get the federal court to stop the State Department from doing this anymore.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember back when the legislation was written for the Global Engagement Center, the arm of the State Department that’s
doing this right now. I was happy to see that there was an effort to counter Chinese Communist Party propaganda. They had a billion dollar foreign influence campaign being pushed into the United States. It seemed like this was our effort to try and counter that.

Mr. Chenoweth:
It was kind of like Radio Free Europe for the internet.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right, and more sophisticated. But it’s just heartbreaking to see what it has become.

Mr. Chenoweth:
That’s a good term for it. I was dismayed with both of these cases. When we started the Murthy case, I thought we might find some rogue actors. I had no idea that we were going to uncover a systematic suppression of Americans’ free speech by multiple agencies of the federal government in a coordinated and systematic fashion, going after particular ideas and particular individuals. That is shocking.

Then we found out that not only were these other agencies doing it, but our own State Department was testing software and turning it over to private actors in the United States and encouraging them to use this government-developed software to suppress American speech. That just takes my level of heartbreak, to use your word, to an even deeper level.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the status of this case?

Mr. Chenoweth:
The Murthy case will be argued on March 18th in the Supreme Court, and we’ll have a decision on that by the end of June. The State Department case is still at a pretty early stage. We filed in the Eastern District of Texas with that litigation. Predictably, the State Department is trying to move out of Texas and wants to force us into a different jurisdiction like Washington, D.C.

Presumably, we’ll have some of those initial battles on the litigation. But we think that we’ll get some discovery here pretty quickly, and we’ll get a handle on the scope of the State department’s activities. Then we’ll have more to go on than just the good investigative work that journalists have done so far.

Mr. Jekielek:
What are your thoughts about trying cases in D.C.?

Mr. Chenoweth:
In general, we don’t do it. Look, there are some very fine judges in Washington, D.C., on both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit. It’s not just a question of the makeup of the bench in terms of who appointed most of the judges on the bench, although that is a problem. The majority of the judges at both the district level and the court of appeals level in D.C. are appointed by folks who do not share the same jurisprudential approach that the New Civil Liberties Alliance has.

But it goes beyond that too. The judges in D.C., and this would even include some of the folks who’ve been elevated from the D.C. circuit to the Supreme Court, like maybe even Chief Justice Roberts, they are a little more willing to go along with the government’s view on things. They are a little more willing to go along with administrative agency perspectives than some of the judges in the hinterlands that don’t live inside the beltway. They are maybe not as mesmerized by the government’s view or not as prepared to go along with the government’s representations about different things.

Mr. Jekielek:
This issue seems to keep coming up. That’s the reason I mention it.

Mr. Chenoweth:
But there are examples of us having a case against the nationwide eviction moratorium that we had brought in the Northern District of Georgia and tried to bring up through the 11th Circuit. Meanwhile, someone else brought a case in the D.C. District Court and up through the D.C. Circuit. Even though they lost at both levels, they got the case up to the Supreme Court very quickly by losing at both of the lower court levels. I suppose that’s a strategy we should keep in mind for the future as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s jump to the bump stock issue. Some people might not even understand what a bump stock is, so tell us about that. How did this issue get to the Supreme Court? It’s not obvious why.

Mr. Chenoweth:
We won in a lower court and the Solicitor General sought a petition of certiorari. Usually, if the Solicitor General seeks a petition in a case in which a federal statute or a federal rule has been set aside by a lower court, the Supreme Court will usually take a look at that. We’re also in a situation here where we have four different courts of appeals who have looked at this question.

We won in the Fifth Circuit. There was another case that won in the Sixth Circuit. We lost in the Tenth Circuit. There was another case that was lost in the D.C. Circuit. You have two circuit courts on both sides of the issue. It really was a moderate circuit split. But it’s the kind of case where you can’t have a law like this be applied in two different ways.

Mr. Jekielek:
In other words, it might actually be obvious it’s a case that should be going to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Jan, there has been a narrative out there that the Supreme Court is looking to reach out and take Second Amendment cases or try to vindicate gun rights. There is a problem with that narrative in this case. First of all, it’s not a Second Amendment case. We’ll get back to that.

Secondly, the court did not reach out for this case. In fact, it denied cert [denial of a petition for writ of certiorari] in one of our earlier cases. It denied cert several times in cases having to do with bump stocks. This is the first time it granted cert [granted a writ of certiorari]. It’s also the first time that the government was the one asking for cert.

It was high time for the court to look at this issue. The rule went into effect in 2019. As a result of the rule, 500,000 folks were turned into felons overnight.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain to us what a bump stock is.

Mr. Chenoweth:
Sure. The stock of a gun is the part that you hold against your shoulder. It’s the part between the trigger and the back end of the gun. With a bump stock, you remove the regular stock from the gun and you put on this piece of plastic that replaces the regular stock. It does not affect the trigger assembly at all. It’s just changing the stock of the gun.

There are a couple of features of the bump stock that make the gun operate slightly differently. There’s an extension ledge that’s part of it that allows you to rest your finger in front of the trigger. Instead of putting your finger on the trigger, you rest your finger on this ledge in front of the trigger. There is also a one-inch gap that when the gun recoils, instead of it coming back against your shoulder, it first recoils into that space for about an inch before it comes back against your shoulder. A combination of that gap and having that extension ledge means that you’re able to bump fire the weapon.

Bump firing means that instead of pulling the trigger with your finger, you have to use your off hand, your non-trigger hand, to push the gun away from you. That’s counterintuitive. Ordinarily, if you’re firing a weapon, you’re pulling the whole weapon into your shoulder, at least if it’s a long gun. Here, you’re simultaneously pulling with your trigger hand back and pushing with your non-trigger hand out in kind of a separating kind of a motion.

When you do that, it pushes the trigger into your finger rather than pulling back on it. If you keep doing that multiple times and you become good at it, then you can essentially fire faster. It’s not intuitive and it’s not natural. Look, anybody can pick up a machine gun, pull the trigger, and a whole bunch of bullets come out. The question in front of the court is whether or not a semi-automatic weapon equipped with a bump stock is a machine gun.

The government says that it is, and we say that it isn’t. We say, “If you want to ban this weapon and call it a machine gun, that’s something Congress needs to do. Congress is the one that decides whether something is criminal behavior or not. As an agency, you can’t just reinterpret a statute to increase the scope of criminality.”

Remember, for 15-plus years ATF said that this device was perfectly lawful. Then they just turned around and said, “This is a machine gun that is illegal.” When Congress banned machine guns back in 1986, and President Reagan signed that law banning machine guns, they put a 10-year prison sentence on that. By the way, the ATF rule also bans the bump stock.
Even if you didn’t own a semi-automatic weapon, and you just had possession of a bump stock, you would potentially be facing 10 years in federal prison.

Congress never said that, and Congress wouldn’t say that. There have been a number of bills introduced in Congress to ban bump stocks and never passed. You may remember there was a bipartisan gun control bill that passed Congress a couple of years ago, but it didn’t ban bump stocks. They’ve looked at this question multiple times, and they’ve never been able to get a majority to do it.

There’s a democratic deficit problem here as well with the agency doing something that Congress looked at and deliberately didn’t do. We think that it’s important that the court recognize that, and that the court not allow a federal agency to increase the scope of criminal law.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are a half-million people that are in jeopardy here.

Mr. Chenoweth:
The rule said that you either have to destroy your bump stock by destroying or turning it into your local ATF authority. Our clients turned it into ATF, but said, “Hold on to these because we’re suing you. We want these back when we win.” If they win, our clients will get them back. A lot of people won’t get them back, because they didn’t do a similar thing or they destroyed them.

But the principle still matters. It’s not the role of ATF to decide that a bump stock or a pistol brace is unlawful. It’s different if you’re talking about something that obviously is a machine gun. That’s why there’s a statutory definition that ATF is empowered to employ against those sorts of devices.

Congress has said what makes something a machine gun is if it automatically fires more than one bullet with a single function of the trigger. The court is going to be looking at what it means to automatically fire, and what counts as a single function of the trigger. As I explained earlier, bump stocks are not automatic.

In order to overcome the recoil after each bullet fires, you have to re-engage with your non-trigger hand to push forward. That is literally a manual activity that you’re engaged in by pushing forward on the forestock of the gun. For that reason, it fails the automatic fire test.

In terms of the single function of the trigger, the trigger on the weapon works exactly the same way. Whether a bump stock is attached or a bump stock isn’t attached, it doesn’t change the mechanism. The only thing that changed is the stock. We haven’t touched the trigger, and we haven’t done anything to the trigger.

The idea is that the trigger has somehow become illegal because of something we’ve done to another part of the gun doesn’t make sense. It’s still a single function of the trigger. It still works exactly the same way whether you’re firing regularly or bump firing. The trigger moves the same distance.

They call it bump firing, but the trigger moves the same amount. The same amount of pressure is put on the trigger to initiate firing. Only one bullet is released for every time the trigger is is bumped, so it operates as a semi-automatic weapon, not as a machine gun

Mr. Jekielek:
You said this isn’t a Second Amendment issue. Can you explain that to us?

Mr. Chenoweth:
What I mean is there are no second amendment arguments in the case. No one has said that this is not the kind of law that Congress could pass if it wanted to, or if Congress had passed this law then someone might sue and say, “The Second Amendment doesn’t allow you to ban this.” But we’re not even at that stage here. That’s not an issue in this case.

Frankly, if congress had passed this the New Civil Liberties Alliance wouldn’t be protesting it, because our role is to fight against unlawful administrative power, and that’s what we see in all three of these cases. We see the ATF using unlawful administrative power in place of Congress to ban bump stocks.

We see the Department of Commerce using unlawful administrative power in the Relentless case where they’ve gotten the Chevron deference. We didn’t even talk about the underlying facts of that case, but essentially, the Department of Commerce is trying to force fishermen to pay for federal monitors on their boats that Congress never authorized.

Then lastly, with the social media censorship case, you see unlawful administrative power being used to suppress free speech. That’s what these cases all have in common. The good news is that the Supreme Court agreed to hear all of these cases. If we win all these cases, and we have a really good shot at that, then we will have struck a blow against unlawful administrative power.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mark Chenoweth, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mark Chenoweth:
Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Mark Chenoweth and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.