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Comment by daotoad | Hacker News Reader

If you accept that the law is ambiguous and that the current Secretary of Labor is effectively making law by choosing an interpretation, you must also accept that the existing regulatory structure also derives from a choice made by a previous Secretary of Labor who effectively made law by so doing so.

Your argument does not provide any basis for preferring one interpretation over another.

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That's because it's not an argument about which interpretation is preferable. The parent comment said it is not the secretary's job to rewrite the law (which implies that the secretary is not making law), and my argument is that that the secretary is indeed writing law.

In terms of preference, mine is not for one labor secretary's policy over another (I mean, I have a preference there, but it's beside the point here). My argument is that the labor secretary is making law here, and that is a bad thing because it is the job of Congress to make laws, which they are utterly failing to do.

It is the Secretary's job to (have their department) write regulations. Regulations are the implementation of the specification laid out in law. When the law is ambiguous, regulators have to choose an interpretation.

Congressional paralysis is definitely a problem, but until we have a major change in either Senate rules or political paradigm, we not see any improvement on that front.

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