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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Well the way it should work is that executive orders are not laws and should not be treated as such. They’re supposed to be memos about how executive agencies should interpret the law. Somehow though, as congress has languished they’ve been accruing more and more power

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Congress largely relinquished that power by creating bills that establish rule-making executive agencies rather than writing the rules themselves. That leaves congresspeople free to do things like trade stocks and raise money for their respective parties. They claim they would be too busy to read all the rules they would have to pass, but (1) that's the point and (2) they pass massive bills they don't read anyway. This version of America is fundamentally broken, but it seems to be the nash equilibrium of the system given greedy congrespeople and a greedy executive.

No, that's bullshit.

Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things."

No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when executive orders started to become much more common.

I think you need to read some history, because what I'm talking about happened in the 1930's-60's, when Obama wasn't even born yet. The regulatory agencies are ponderous and slow, too. They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.

Executive orders are the latest extension of the trend of do-nothing congresses. They have been growing exponentially over time.

> They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.

Yes, this (to an extent), but more importantly, they're also experts. The people hired at these agencies aren't politicians, they're professionals.

Seems to me most congress people can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground these days. Do we really need them chiming in on what medicine is okay and what isn't?

Do you think they are the ones writing the 1000-page bills they pass on a weekly basis? Laws are also generally written by experts.

There's a reason "it would take an act of Congress" is a saying.

I'd call that the rule of law. If Congress is unable to perform that duty, it falls upon themselves to resign their position in favor of an fairly elected candidate who will.

It sounded like you were going to disagree, but then I think you arrived at the same place more or less. Congress, on net, isn’t doing what it needs to be doing. Is that not a critical problem? If the executive who takes up that slack is Trump, suddenly people notice what a problem it is. But, it is not about Trump specifically, but rather an ongoing and systemic issue with our two party system, and it will predictably escalate due to partisans in Washington and their unwavering supporters.

I was emphatically disagreeing with their first sentence. The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently, with the obviously-corrupt SCOTUS ruling ending Chevron deference.

Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.

> The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently

Between about 1985 (Chevron) and 2010 (the populist movements in both parties), this idea was at its nadir of popularity. For the entire rest of US history from 1776-1980 and 2010-2025, a distrust of a large executive branch was very popular, and pretty much bipartisan most of the time. Just because you do not remember a time when this idea was popular, it does not mean that it was a fringe one only until very recently.

Congress is designed to be gridlocked. That's its natural state. We are now learning why it's a good idea to have a relatively ineffective government.

No in fact I'd say we are learning why its bad to have ineffective goverment. It lets people believe any blowhard thats claiming to be able to get things done. And its easy to do stuff when you don't care about destroying things or making things worse or following the law

I think my mileage varies a bit. I was an Obama/Clinton supporter, and I have always felt strongly that the legislative branch was… less than efficient. Delegating away the hard non-glamorous stuff is incentivized and nothing changes because the DC system as a whole just works that way. Both parties want less accountability and more power, but citizens need the opposite. There has to be some reasonable amount of legislation coming from the legislature or what are they there for other than grandstanding, fundraising and performative outrage?

When a law is passed that says "Do what the executive agency says.", then it makes executive orders that control that executive agency on the level of laws. Even with some limits in the original law, the executive order becomes like a law at least within those limits. But it isn't a law, meaning that some protections based on laws aren't offered. So now we run into an issue where we have things that aren't laws that effectively work as a law as far as the common man cares. The only simple fix I see for this is to require that all laws must clearly define what is and isn't illegal without any regard to another system's interpretation of the matter (but as with any simple fix, it is never that simple).

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