[linkjuice4all]

While I dislike poorly written laws (including those that work around some failing of our current "state" of government) and judges lacking accountability - this seems to be in the same league as the EPA Regulator Case[0] that's sitting at the Supreme Court right now.

The end-goal doesn't appear to be justice for the aggrieved party but more so the elimination of agency-issued oversight. The jurisprudence seems to follow the idea that if the legislator didn't explicitly grant or disallow an agency to do something or regulate something then that agency has absolutely no power at all to do it.

On a basic level this seems to make sense but the practical application of this would mean that legislators would need to explicitly pass legislation anytime a regulatory body needs to address a specific issue or regulate some behavior (that presumably they already had the authority to regulate by the very nature of the agency being created).

This _may_ be a regular case that naturally found its way into the legal system - but the 5th circuit has the history that it does and the targets of these lawsuits (SEC, EPA, etc) typically have deep-pocketed foes.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/02/28/1082934438/supreme-court-to-h...

[xyzzyz]

> On a basic level this seems to make sense but the practical application of this would mean that legislators would need to explicitly pass legislation anytime a regulatory body needs to address a specific issue or regulate some behavior

Yeah, can you imagine the horror of making the congressmen actually do their job and pass the laws, instead of delegating all their authority to unelected, nameless, and effectively unaccountable bureaucrats, so that they have more time to spend on fundraising and campaigning? This will literally grind US into halt, and bring it to similar stagnation and stasis it was under before FDR.

[_moof]

> Yeah, can you imagine the horror of making the congressmen actually do their job and pass the laws, instead of delegating all their authority to unelected, nameless, and effectively unaccountable bureaucrats

As someone subject to a significant body of federal regulation on a technical subject, I would absolutely prefer to have those rules in the hands of the level-headed experts who currently control them rather than a bunch of loud-mouthed politicians - politicians who would still have to gun for votes every N years, and wouldn't bat an eye at doing so by turning technical rules they don't understand into culture war fodder. No thanks.

[vkou]

> Yeah, can you imagine the horror of making the congressmen actually do their job and pass the laws, instead of delegating all their authority to unelected, nameless, and effectively unaccountable bureaucrats

1. Those bureaucrats are appointed by the President, whom you vote for, and by Congress, whom you vote for, and may be fired by the former. If you don't like what the executive branch of the government looks like, I have great news for you - you elect your chief executive! And people you elect appoint his immediate underlings!

2. In 2022, I wouldn't hold my breath for congress to pass any laws. Half of congress governs under the explicit mandate that the people paying for their campaign should be above any law, and the other half governs under an implicit mandate to the same effect.

[xyzzyz]

> Those bureaucrats are appointed by the President, whom you vote for, and by Congress, whom you vote for, and may be fired by the former.

I wish this was the case, but it is not: only a minuscule fraction of government bureaucrats is politically appointed. The people actually drafting the million pages of administrative regulations are overwhelmingly career bureaucrats, who are effectively unfireable.

> 2. In 2022, I wouldn't hold my breath for congress to pass any laws

The Congress does pass some laws, for things it cares about and where there is a broad agreement as to what the law should be. If the elected representative cannot get enough votes to pass a law, it most likely means that the law is not that important, or that there is no agreement on what it should be.

[vkou]

> The people actually drafting the million pages of administrative regulations are overwhelmingly career bureaucrats, who are effectively unfireable.

They report to the appointed heads of these agencies, who both sign off on their work, and have the power to either fire them, or reassign them, when they refuse to draft the regulations they are told to draft.

The reason they don't tend to get fired, is because they tend to do what they are told.

[sofixa]

> If the elected representative cannot get enough votes to pass a law, it most likely means that the law is not that important, or that there is no agreement on what it should be.

I'm not even in the US and i know that's quite simply untrue. Almost every single issue gets split among party lines, regardless of its merits. Abortions, vaccinations, climate change combatting are supported by the majority of the population, yet no law on either can really be passed due to arcane rules and the refusal of one party to do anything that might benefit the other ( which is more interested in appearing right and not rocking the boat than actually doing anything).

You people need a revolution ( of the head chopping kind, or at least prison/exile) and a complete overhaul of your broken political system. There's no excuse to stick with the first past the post system, gerrymandered districts, voter disenfranchisement, electoral college and the pure temerity around it ( a candidate gets 5k votes more than the other in a state? All electoral votes from that state go to them! ?????) besides the "sanctity" of the current status quo your current political establishment espouses.

[xyzzyz]

> Abortions, vaccinations, climate change combatting are supported by the majority of the population, yet no law on either can really be passed due to arcane rules and the refusal of one party to do anything that might benefit the other

This is an extremely simplistic, if not outright naive take. Majority might be for “combatting climate change”, sure, but when it comes to actual methods to do that, you’ll find that there is hardly a broad agreement as to what exactly should be done about it.

For example, I support carbon tax, but I’m against directly subsidizing solar/wind energy projects (as we do now). You’ll also find plenty of people who support both of these measures, and those who support only subsidies, but not direct carbon tax. What to do about it?

The current approach seems to be that the Congress, instead of talking it among themselves, making deals and reaching majority to pass a bill, just delegates the job away to bureaucrats in federal agency. As a result, in so many aspects of life, we are being ruled by unelected, unaccountable, nameless bureaucrats, who proclaim “rules” that no majority would ever support. What’s the point of democracy again?

There is, of course, another solution to this, that works much better in practice: getting federal government out of all of this, and leave these things to states, exactly as the authors of the system intended. You’ll observe that the states have much less troubles passing bills about protecting or prohibiting abortion, for example. Why must everything be ruled by federal government, which was never intended to be doing that?

[vkou]

Congress delegated this rule-making power to the executive. Congress is legally empowered to do this.

If you are unhappy about this, why won't you have congress undelegate this power? It is fully within its powers to do just that. You seem to believe that congress doing its job is the solution to this problem - why not solve it through congress doing its job?

[remarkEon]

Your first point is a little misleading. There's a portion of the administrative state that is filled via executive appointment, yes, however the vast majority are not. There's several hundred thousand semi-permanent positions that are held by career civil servants.

[peyton]

The President cannot fire arbitrary federal employees.

[vkou]

Correct, just like it's correct to say that the president, and his appointees can set the agendas of the executive agencies that they run.