The View from K Street: Severed from responsibility

However the current era is characterized by future historians, political commentators will have to consider our piece of time as one that shifted the center of power from the Imperial Presidency to the Omnipotent Judiciary. For some, this view is supported by the series of precedent-breaking decisions that fundamentally transformed not only the law but also the lives of tens of millions of people. For others, these sea-changes can be added to the courts’ shift from self-imposed judicial restraint to untrammeled self-regard and personal expression. This judicial activism has profoundly altered the relationship between the Executive and the Judiciary. Regulations, for example, seem drafted not to express the policies of the elected administration, but rather to satisfy the positions of appointed jurists. Nowhere is this tense battle better seen than in the Department of Labor’s (DOL) recently published overtime regulations, our subject here. (for a full discussion of the regulations, see “Department of Labor publishes new overtime regulations”).

Overtime regulation and severability