[dahfizz]

> Too often we look at the end results (e.g. will this increase vaccination rates) rather than the means of getting there.

Strongly agree. Tangentially, I felt this way about net neutrality. It should have been law passed by Congress. Instead, everyone cheered when an unelected executive board passed a net neutrality bill that the public wasn't allowed to read.

And then, everyone had the audacity to be surprised when the FTC undid net neutrality as fast as it did it. There is a reason we have a legislature and not just an executive branch that can do anything it wants.

[verall]

Because the chance of a net neutrality bill making it through the Senate is roughly equivalent to guessing Satoshi's wallet. We can barely pass debt ceiling increases to avoid national default.

The net neutrality PR did work though, the FCC was under a lot of pressure . ATT didn't pay all of those marketing firms to fraudulently post thousands of anti-net-neutrality comments for nothing.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, but then the answer is to fix Congress, not to bypass it.

[kelnos]

And what if it is fundamentally unfixable? Do we just allow everything to grind to a halt and pretend that everything is working as designed as the country crumbles beneath us? I guess that's easier to do when it's the working class and not most HN-type folks who would get hit the hardest by that plan.

Congress has been delegating rule-making authority to the executive branch since before all of us were born. You may not like that, or you may think some amount of delegation is appropriate, but we've passed that point. But this is the reality here, and the functioning of our federal government pretty much has this baked in at this point, for better or worse.

[AnimalMuppet]

If it's fundamentally unfixable, then the Constitution fundamentally doesn't work, or at least doesn't work with the society we have now. I think the first step is to figure out why. Did this ever work, or were we just kidding ourselves for two centuries? If it worked then but not now, what changed?

Then, once the cause is understood, the next step would be to figure out an appropriate system that would work, or at least work better, and amend the Constitution to reflect that new system.

The alternative is to just let things continue as they are going, and I don't like that choice. It results in the president becoming more of a ruler and less of an executive. I expect less freedom down that road (and eventually none), and I don't like it.

My take on the questions I posed is this: Yes, it did work, at least adequately, and now it doesn't. What changed? I suspect that it was Roe v Wade. Since then, the right has been trying to get control of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, and the left has been trying to block them. So both are fighting over control of the nomination process, which means the presidency and the Senate. I suspect that that's the cause of the trench warfare in Congress.

If I'm right, then it is in fact ultimately unfixable. Neither side is going to compromise, ever. You can't even fix it by amending the Constitution, because then there's going to be a battle about undoing the amendment.