Still, there’s something to be said for making the effort. So here goes. “‘The administrative state’ is that quota of political power that covertly fills the vacuum left by the failure of the legislative branch to discharge its obligations.”

Two things are critical. One is the displacement of sovereignty. No longer are the people sovereign. The bureaucracy is.

The second critical thing is the covert nature of the enterprise. The question “What is the administrative state?” can seem difficult to answer because it is not supposed to exist in the first place. You know it only by its actions. You cannot look it up in the statute book, much less in the Constitution. Indeed, the very fact of the administrative state violates any number of Constitutional norms, not least its being a sort of “fourth branch” of government when the Constitution provides for only three.