Sometimes I have despair at the government even when some branch or agency does the right thing. The Supreme Court wants Congress to be the ones who make gun law, not less-accountable and less-constitutional agencies. Well, great. We've been hearing for years that it should be congress and not any of the last 14* presidents, more than my lifetime, to (sorta, kinda, I-didn't-really but now we're here and we have to pay 10x more than we promised for it) declare war.
Congress would rather not do that job. Someone will surely be upset at any decision and who knows if that will ruin A) Your chances of being a playah in your party or worse B) hurt your chances for re-election. So they do other jobs instead, that make people upset enough to grumble but not riot - or not riot too hard, anyway.
Sometimes the agency in question is nefarious, power-seeking, conscienceless. Sometimes they just have a job to do and in the absence of congress doing its job, they make up rules and say "All you guys have to wear green, and the girls will wear yellow. And we'll decide where the boundary is, dammit."
Who to blame? All of us, as usual. It's too much trouble for the citizenry so we just go about our business and hope that all those people In Charge of Stuff get it right more than 50% of the time.
*Maybe Ford should be excluded.
1 comment:
Congress has largely laid down its legislative function since the 1930s, picked up eagerly by the new executive agencies. That's actually what FDR's court-packing scheme was about, as you doubtless remember: he kept having his NRA (not the rifle association!) shut down by SCOTUS as an unconstitutional exercise in legislative delegation.
He didn't end up getting the court packed, but he did get them to go along with letting the delegation slide.
If the new SCOTUS actually keeps this up, possibly Congress will rediscover its constitutional role and start doing the right... well, that's probably too much to hope for. Perhaps they'll occasionally stop doing the wrong thing, if only because it keeps getting shut down by SCOTUS when they do.
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