Radical court rulings threaten to strip people of the right to govern themselves. The people’s elected representatives in state legislatures often pass laws that prevent cities from adopting burdensome rules, such as ordinances whose costs fall not just on city residents, but on people who live outside their borders. States’ right to preempt burdensome local rules was undermined by a recent federal appeals court ruling. It allowed Alabama to be sued for its law overriding the Birmingham City Council’s attempt to increase the minimum wage. That minimum wage increase would have led to both job losses and increased consumer prices for non-residents who work in the city.

When the White House orders federal agencies to comply with a Supreme Court decision, that’s not a sign of dictatorship looming, but rather, a vindication of the rule of law. But left-leaning lawyers, bloggers, and officials are claiming otherwise. They are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s compliance with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Education Department last week rightly withdrew two famous examples of regulatory “dark matter” issued during the Obama administration: its April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” about “sexual violence” and its April 29, 2014 “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence.” These bureaucratic decrees heavily intruded into how schools handle complaints of sexual harassment and assault, banning the clear-and-convincing evidence standard, restricting cross-examination rights, and restricting the appeal rights of accused people.

On September 12, the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project released a paper about illegal overreaching by the Obama-era Education and Justice Departments, which resulted in policies that still persist today. The paper, written mostly by people with a civil rights background, examines three areas in which the federal government attempted to micromanage educational institutions by imposing new rules that never went through the legally-prescribed rulemaking process and purported to do so based on antidiscrimination statutes passed many years ago. These rules dealt with three areas: (1) transgender bathroom, locker, and dormitory room access under Title IX, a statute which bans discrimination based on “sex,” not “gender identity”; (2) investigations by colleges and schools of sexual assault and harassment claims, also under Title IX; and (3) school districts that suspend more students of one race than another, or whose discipline policies have an unintentional “disparate impact,” under Title VI, a statute which bans intentional racial discrimination.

In a major speech today, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos indicated that the Education Department may withdraw some of the regulatory “dark matter” discussed by CEI’s Wayne Crews, such as its April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter micromanaging college discipline.

On Tuesday of last week, the White House suspended a burdensome reporting requirement for employers that would have cost them $400 million while yielding information of questionable value. It did so in rejecting changes to the EEO-1 form made at the end of the Obama administration.

The harm from occupational licensing regulations is so obvious that even the Obama administration, which was usually pro-regulation, recognized it.

A college president recently promoted fallacies about the law in order to justify federal micromanagement of school discipline.

Even modest and long-overdue budget cuts draw condemnation.