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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

> It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous.

Why doesn’t congress do its job and write laws that do things?

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Because the republicans punish their own when they reach out to support bipartisan efforts.

Even right now, congressmen have been threatened with being primaries if they don’t toe the line.

There has been multiple decades of very public efforts to degrade and break the American system. Ever since watergate.

Congress was broken.

I don't disagree with you, and neither would the Founding Fathers. In fact they were even opposed to the concept of political parties, but the power/convenience they enable means that lasted all of 5 seconds. But I would say that Congressmen being threatened with being primaried if they do unpopular things is literally the entire point of representative democracy.

I think the question is when that pressure to obey is coming from the people and when it's instead coming from the party. In the ideal scenario the party and the people (at least the constituency) would be in lockstep. In any case term limits would help. If you're going to be out of office in at most two terms, it eliminates any point about sacrificing your values for some sort of long-term favor/benefit with the party.

Why this conversation, where it seems like these things are mysterious?

Post watergate, Conservatives built FOX, they laid out their plan to break the american system, and take over to push their agenda.

No one took it seriously, and now when its happening, people are still unable to look at it.

You have the pantomine of a party. They have debates. They have primaries. They have a media organization which is 'independent'.

The way regulatory authority works is that Congress writes laws that offer general guidance, and then regulatory body creates rules around that guidance. It can enable them to quickly react to changing scenarios, and also offer greater expertise or more detail than may be reasonable to expect of Congress. The issues arises when it's unclear if actions and guidance are aligned.

For a contemporary example, part of the CDC's power comes from Section 361 of the Public Health Services Act [1], which grants them the power to execute orders to prevent the spread of disease into the country or in between states. Examples included inspection, pest extermination, fumigation, and so on. The CDC invoked this power to prevent landlords from evicting delinquent tenants during the COVID stuff.

That was a gross enough (and also, critically, harmful enough) violation of their mandate that it was able to be challenged in the courts and eventually tossed even in the Chevon Deference era, but a lot of scenarios are much more ambiguous. So now their actions will be fully subject to oversight from all branches of government. The end result is that executive departments will have a much harder time overstepping the bounds of authority granted to them by Congress.

[1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8773/pdf/COMPS-877... (page 405)

> The end result is that executive departments will have a much harder time overstepping the bounds of authority granted to them by Congress.

You could’ve fooled me.

The solution is to fix congress, rather than further consolidate executive branch. Later leads to very predictable outcomes, and they aren’t exactly democratic.

I’ll choose stale democracy over striving autocracy each day every day.

It'll take some time, but I would highly recommend reading the oral argument transcript for the Chevron decision. You'll see some good history and opinions on why Congress now does what it does.

It wasn't always so. In 1979, when Chrysler wanted federal loan guarantees, Congress passed a specific act to do so. Contrast that with what's now a blanket check to agencies thru an Omnibus

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...

Where do you think all these powerful agencies came from?

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