I think a technocratic executive bureaucracy, created and overseen by the legislature, is better than demanding the legislature directly craft all regulations and have judges adjudicate every nuance.
Why do you think that's better? Whose priorities and interests do we expect these 'technocratic executive bureaucracies' to pursue if allowed to be the arbiters of their own authority, and what mechanism would ensure they remain accountable to the public and operate within the applicable constraints of prevailing law and the constiution?
Why do you think a crippled group of 500 generalists should write every single detail of regulatory code for every facet of American life?
Why do you think federal agencies are arbiters of their own authority? Congress created them, Congress can reel them in.
I don't mean to say that executive agencies shouldn't be held to the Constitution or the law. Who says they shouldn't? But they should be allowed to have a broad mandate.
Maybe, MAYBE some kind of rubber stamp process where legislators get a 90 day window on rejecting new regulations with a "default approve". But I have no faith that a modern society can have all rules and edge cases pre-emptively defined in law.
> Why do you think a crippled group of 500 generalists should write every single detail of regulatory code for every facet of American life?
They shouldn't. No single entity should ever be allowed to "to write every single detail of regulatory code for every facet of American life".
Thankfully, with this decision, we have restored a situation where law and policy are developed and refined through the interplay of disparate branches of government with ultimate accountability to the public itself, with edge cases handled by the specialists who actually have the relevant expertise in interpreting law.
> I don't mean to say that executive agencies shouldn't be held to the Constitution or the law. Who says they shouldn't?
Well, that's the implicit argument of the people who are saying they should continue to be allowed to act as the arbiters of their own authority, without judicial oversight.
> But they should be allowed to have a broad mandate.
Unelected appointees who are hired on the basis of their expertise in a technical field, without necessarily having any special competence at handling the normative aspect of their duties, should absolutely not have a broad mandate to decide what the limits of their own authority are.
>They shouldn't. No single entity should ever be allowed to "to write every single detail of regulatory code for every facet of American life".
You shouldn't be having this conversation if you do not understand the basic civics of the US government and the role the legislative body plays, let alone your own damn argument.
You're right, I shouldn't be having this conversation if I didn't have a basic understanding of the fundamental structure of the US government. Since I have a relatively advanced understanding of that topic, however, we shall continue.
So, the US Constitution distributes political authority among three distinct but co-equal branches of government. Legislative authority is assigned to Congress, executive power belongs to the president, and judicial power is the purview of the Supreme Court.
The Constitution makes no mention of administrative agencies -- these are entirely creatures of statue law subsequent and subordinate to the Constitution, and did not begin to exist significantly until more than a century after the Victorian
Constitution went into effect.
There is no explicit authority for Congress to delegate legislative power to any other institution, and whether this is entirely legitimate remains a master of some debate.
The Constitution further explicitly assigns judicial power to the Supreme Court, and in no way obligates the court to delegate its inherent duty of statutory interpretation to executive branch agencies, least of all to defer to those agencies in establishing the boundaries of their own statutory power.
Finally, the Constitution enumerates the scope of the legislative power assigned to Congress, and explicitly reserves all non-enumerated powers to "the states or the people respectively". There is no basis whatsoever in our system of government for any single institution to unilaterally "regulate every facet of American life", least of all at the federal level.
>Well, that's the implicit argument of the people who are saying they should continue to be allowed to act as the arbiters of their own authority, without judicial oversight.
No, that's no my implicit argument so you're wrong on the facts. And you keep saying they are the arbiters of their own authority.
I'm afraid that it's you who are wrong on the facts: Congress does not exercise direct oversight over the behavior of these agencies.
Congress passes statutes that establish and grant authority to administrative agencies, and may from time to time pass new legislation that adjusts prevailing law, but they do not intervene to exercise oversight under the current statutes in effect.
That oversight -- evaluating the specific actions of those agencies and determining whether they are within the scope of current law -- has always been the role of other institutions.
Conventionally (and constitutionally), responsibility for for that oversight -- i.e. determining the meaning of the applicable statutes, and deciding whether specific behaviors and actions are within the law -- belongs entirely to the courts.
A few decades ago, the courts decided to abdicate this responsibility, and instead defer to those agencies' own interpretation of the statutes they operate under, indeed having the effect of making them "arbiters of their own authority". This is what Chevron doctrine refers to, and is what the new court decision has finally reversed.