Allowing the Office of the Attorney General wide discretion to regulate speech seems like it wouldn’t square up with “smaller government” ideals favored by a Republican Supreme Court, especially when the AG could be a Democrat in less than a year.
Reagan, the arch-priest of the small government cult did it too. He bullied states into changing the minimum drinking age by withholding Federal funding.
Small government advocates do not remember Reagan fondly because of his drug policy and how he screwed the second amendment.
Small government advocates haven't been a fan of federal drug policy for a very long time. I remember seeing bumper stickers with quips like "I dream of a world where men can smoke pot with their husbands" in the early 1990s.
That would be in-part because those two groups you mention like to advertise themselves are proponents of small government, when most often they are not. Hell I'd even wager many libertarians are less small-government than they claim and I've even heard many of them complain about too many Republican-lite types associating themselves.
Ultimately if you delegate power and decision making enough, a few people with the consolidated power call the shots no matter how many smaller governments/powers exist. OP cited Regan as an example of that
People rarely use the Small Government argument to combat items like excessive military expenses. It's always to do with taxes, privatizing (profitable) government functions, or criticizing consumer protection laws.
Just realize that to a significant part of the thinking public, it's NOT about that. It's about the government controlling everything from the size of your soda to your toilet seat size to the way your kids are educated to how you get your healthcare.
A significant part of the public does NOT believe if it's a good idea, and there are bad consequences to someone not following the good idea, it therefore ought to be a law. It's not cynical on their part at all.
Just trying to share with you the perspective of these people.
I see these things as falling under "consumer protection laws." There are lots of areas where the free market creates perverse incentives and society has created regulations in order to address these issues. We have food regulations because companies used to lie about the food they were selling, we have building codes because companies were constructing unsafe buildings, we have education regulation because schools were failing to provide a base-line education, and we are pushing for healthcare regulations because the private sector has fucked healthcare industry so badly that most of us feel that we should nuke it from orbit.
You might not agree with my take, but I assure you that we are talking about the same thing. You may not think the public agrees with these things, but regulations like this didn't appear out of thin air and private companies certainly didn't put them in place. What happened was the public got tired of dealing with these problems and elected politicians who did something about it.
Anyone can convince themselves that such a set must exist just by answering the question - are there likely to be people in administrative agencies who had the specific ambition to put themselves into those positions to achieve a purely political, not "good public policy", ends?
In otherwords are there crusaders in the adminstrative agencies?
It's like asking if some politicians are crooked or if some people are criminals.
That's why it's an error to dismiss the cries of foul play when they're raised. We know those people are there somewhere.