I am one of those really weird people who likes spending cool evenings reading appellate court opinions. Why? Because they are incredible real-life stories - if anyone were to willingly, (not forced to in law school) read some of these things, they could make movies, write best-selling books, etc. As the oft-quoted saying goes: "Truth is stranger than fiction."

Anyhoo... I digress, but this one just hit home for me, my fellow frens

"The bicentennial of the United States Constitution in 1987 celebrated our Founding generation’s ingenious system of separated powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. The Constitution inaugurated a revolutionary design. Madisonian architecture infused with Newtonian genius—three separate branches locked in synchronous orbit by competing interests. "Ambition ... made to counteract ambition," explained Madison, making clear that this law of constitutional motion, using friction to combat faction, was a feature, not a bug. Our Constitution’s most essential attribute, the separation of powers, presumes conflict, which, counterintuitively, produces equilibrium as the branches behave not as willing partners but as wary rivals. And our Constitution’s paramount aim, preserving individual liberty, presumes that branches will behave neither centripetally (seizing other branches’ powers) nor centrifugally (ceding their own), but jealously (defending their assigned powers against encroachment). No mere tinkerers, the Framers upended things. Three rival branches deriving power from three unrivaled words—"We the People"—inscribed on the parchment in supersize script. In an era of kings and sultans, nothing was more audacious than the Preamble’s first three words, a script-flipping declaration that ultimate sovereignty resides not in the government but in the governed."

"The Constitution’s 200th birthday coincided with a centennial, the 100th birthday of the federal administrative state. Congress’s passage in 1887 of the Interstate Commerce Act, making railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation, and the Act’s creation of the nation’s first federal regulatory body, the Interstate Commerce Commission, profoundly altered the Framers’ tripartite structure. The ICC was an amalgam of all three powers, blending functions of all three branches. The administrative state has sprouted since then. But this iron truth endures: Even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats, no less than presidents, legislators, and judges, are bound by constitutional principles. An agency is restrained by the four corners of its enabling statute and "literally has no power to act ... unless and until Congress confers power upon it." And Congress, when creating agencies, is itself constrained—at all times—by the separation of powers."

Collins v. Mnuchin, 938 F.3d 553, 562 (5th Cir. 2019)

...there's more, but I won't hog all the whitespace here. Judge Willett's opinion reads like Faulkner with a gavel and throws Constitutional thunderbolts.

All that sweet talk came from an otherwise mundane case from back in the housing flop crisis - not that it wasn't devastating, don't get me wrong, but it is just that something so poignant said in this day and age - hits between the eyes of these activist judges.

...just my Tuesday afternoon mid-day miller-time offer of some back-in-the-day Americana.