America’s constitutional structure, too few people today understand, was crafted for a good purpose: to disperse governmental power. It was dispersed vertically (little allocated to the national level and most to the states) and horizontally within the national government, where the three branches were assigned specific areas of authority and expected to check and balance each other. The Founders had experienced life under the British Crown with its concentration of power in the monarchy and so disliked it that they risked their lives in a rebellion against it.

The United States prospered under that dispersion of power, but the system began to break down a century ago. The Progressives and especially President Woodrow Wilson believed that the nation would be better off if governmental authority were concentrated in Washington, D.C., primarily exercised by enlightened administrators working in the executive branch. Ever since then, our constitutional structure has been under siege with the dispersion of power steadily giving way. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that today’s presidency wields more power than King George III ever imagined.

Why and how all of that matters is the subject of Liberty’s Nemesis, a superb collection of 26 essays exploring different facets of our increasing concentration of power. Edited by Dean Reuter (a senior staff member at the Federalist Society) and John Yoo (a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley), the essays cover the range of federal action (and sometimes inaction) that is giving us, as the subtitle says, the unchecked expansion of the state.

Readers will probably be at least passingly familiar with most of the topics covered, including the legal wrangling over the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s efforts at preventing people from acquiring guns and ammunition, the unprecedented aggression of the National Labor Relations Board in pushing unionism, Operation Choke Point’s illegal strangling of lawful businesses through abusive banking regulation, federal interference in state voting laws, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of groups that oppose the president’s agenda, and much more. Seeing all of these perversions of the rule of law discussed in one place gives readers a heightened sense of anxiety over the nation’s future.

In his introduction, Reuter maintains that we are “dangerously near a tipping point” in that the balance of power is so eroded in favor of the president that the very concept of checks and balances may be irretrievably lost. Preserving that concept, he writes, “requires a certain faithfulness by all.” The problem is that many politicians today do not act in good faith toward the Constitution they are sworn to uphold. The balance of power inhibits them because it makes governing slow and deliberate, requiring compromise and the willingness to take “no” for an answer. But they are impatient to get things done and happy with the breezy idea expressed by Democratic consultant Paul Begala, “Stroke of the pen—law of the land. Kind of cool.” That, however, is not how our government is supposed to work.

Abuses of power / It isn’t possible to do justice to each of these meaty essays in a short review, so I will concentrate on just a few that I think readers will find the most troubling.

Consider the much debated Second Amendment. The political left loathes the idea that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms and has engaged in a fierce campaign against it. In his contribution, former congressman Bob Barr details the non-legislative, extra-legal means employed by the Obama administration to undermine that right.

One of them was “Operation Fast and Furious,” a gambit undertaken by the Department of Justice to sell firearms to Mexican drug cartel figures with the intention of demonstrating the supposed need for a greater crackdown on arms sales. Some of the weapons involved in this rogue plan were used in a 2010 gun battle that cost a border patrol agent his life. But when Congress investigated and sought information about Fast and Furious, then–attorney general Eric Holder refused to turn over documents and was held in contempt of Congress.

Another abuse of power is Operation Choke Point, which targets legitimate businesses that sell guns and ammunition (as well as other activities deemed unsavory, such as payday lending and coin sales). The operation directs the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to pressure banks into refusing to continue to deal with these kinds of businesses because they are “high risk” as declared by the Obama administration. No law authorizes this operation and when Congress attempted to investigate it, Attorney General Loretta Lynch dismissively promised to “look into it.”

Another instance where the executive branch operated without congressional sanction is the Education Department’s directive for how colleges and universities are to handle allegations of sexual assault on campus. No statute gives the department that authority, but under its “interpretation” of the law and a rule promulgated without adhering to the Administrative Procedure Act, department officials decreed that colleges must follow their dictates.

In their essay on this, Greg Lukianoff and Samantha Harris of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education show how the vague language of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was twisted to mean not just that schools receiving federal student aid money could not discriminate against women (the statute’s clear intention), but to give the Education Department carte blanche to dictate every aspect of school policy having anything to do with sex. Under a 2011 department “guidance letter,” colleges risk the loss of government funds unless they do their utmost to prevent and punish all conduct that could be deemed harassment.

This has First Amendment implications, the authors note. “If a listener takes offense to sex- or gender-related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker has engaged in sexual harassment,” they explain. So we now have college officials frantically monitoring speech that might lead to an investigation by federal bureaucrats. Moreover, a substantial number of male students have been punished or expelled as a result of the blatantly one-sided, quasi-judicial procedures demanded by the department. Thus, both free speech and due process of law have become victims of the Education Department’s overreaching officials.

Neglect of law / Not only does the executive branch make up new laws on its own, but it also neglects to enforce laws it decides don’t fit with its agenda. Several essays deal with that problem, including the administration’s decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act when it was challenged in court, its decision to ignore the law on the deportation of illegal immigrants, and its decision to ignore the law requiring states to clean up their voter lists. Since the first two examples are fairly well known, I’ll discuss the third.

In his essay, “Unilateral Actions of President Obama in Voting and Elections,” Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky examines the various ways the current administration has intervened to improve the chances that Democratic candidates will win elections. This has been accomplished through litigation to block state efforts at making their elections less prone to fraud and by ignoring existing laws when enforcing them would work against Democratic prospects.

Particularly important here is the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires the states to undertake “a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from official lists.” There is evidence that in many if not most states, the rolls are laden with the names of people who have died or moved away. Inaccurate lists make vote fraud much easier. But the Obama administration chose to ignore this law, a Justice Department official calling it “uncongenial” because it did not fit in with the political goal of increasing voter turnout.

Similarly, von Spakovsky charges, the Obama administration was not interested in pursuing cases of voter suppression and intimidation that may have helped its political allies, such as reports of Black Panther Party toughs patrolling Philadelphia precincts to frighten away voters.

Von Spakovsky sums up, writing:

What appears clear is that the administration has misused its authority under various federal voting rights laws to advance its own ideological agenda, and to help ensure the election of candidates of the president’s political party. This is an abuse of executive power delegated to the president by the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” … This administration has failed that obligation.

Indeed so. When a political leader decides not to enforce the laws impartially, but instead to pick and choose which ones to enforce for partisan advantage, a crucial element of democracy’s social contract has been violated.

Yoo’s conclusion / Yoo ends the book with a sobering conclusion. The administrative state that was supposed to make everything more efficient has merely “eased the way for special interests” because they need only to capture the heads of federal agencies rather than the far more difficult task for persuading majorities in both the House and Senate to adopt whatever policies they desire. There is no consent of the governed when the laws are made by unaccountable bureaucrats.

What is to be done? Yoo argues that it is time to “disable and hobble” the administrative state. He would like to see the courts resuscitate the old “non-delegation doctrine” that used to keep Congress from handing its authority over to agencies. He also wants the courts to abandon their position of deference toward most agency actions and their statutory “interpretations.” And he favors a conservative offensive to restore the old concepts of individual rights, going so far as to say that the almost universally reviled decision in Lochner v. New York (1905) was actually correct in that it protected the worker’s freedom to contract as he thinks best.

That Yoo argues for such controls on executive power may seem ironic, given that some have charged him with helping to expand the chief executive’s power while head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration. Nonetheless, the ideas he offers in this essay are good ones. However, the judiciary is mostly in the hands of people who see only good in the administrative state and who often have disdain for claims of individual rights.

Reading Liberty’s Nemesis is like going to see your doctor over what you think is a minor problem, only to learn that you have an aggressive, fast-spreading cancer. You might survive it, but the odds aren’t good. The unchecked expansion of the state has ruined many other nations and our case is advancing rapidly.