I don’t know what the US should do to resolve all this, but it’s getting to be quite the mess.
it really is just another example of how various parts of the US government have been ceding or delegating their responsibilities around willy-nilly
This is the big one. Congress has been delegating their power to the Executive for decades. Rather than meaningful law, they tell the Executive to make regulations that don’t stand the test of time. Congress needs to pass laws again, instead of delegating large swaths of their power.
I can see it being difficult to keep up with the law-writing given how much more complicated the world is now than when Congress was first established. To keep things working properly there should really be a whole lot more congressmen, Congress hasn’t been expanded in a long time and representation is starting to get pretty wonky as a result.
When you get right down to it, I think the root of the problem is just that the American system of governance is just too old. It was one of the first big democracies so it was built without any prior experience of what worked well and what didn’t, and the patches it’s had since it was established have been too minor and are too difficult to apply for it to keep up with things. But a large swath of the American public have been indoctrinated that American democracy is the “greatest in the world” and that the US constitution is a sacred document, so major changes are nigh on impossible even if American politics wasn’t in such a dysfunctionally divided state.
All in all, I’m glad not to be in their shoes right now. Though my own country (Canada) is having some political problems of its own these days they feel more resolvable than all this.
Expanding Congress won’t solve that. There’s only so many votes they can hold in a year and stuffing bills with ever more information and regulations means less and less time for a Representative or Senator to understand it, which reverts to team politics. We should absolutely expand Congress, but this isn’t a reason. Every well functioning government has non legislators promulgating regulations based off legislative guidance.
Exactly. Maybe the agencies should be joint legislative executive or something but we do need them, because I don’t want Jim fucking Jordan deciding how much lead is safe for baby food, but even worse would be for nobody to decide
This is the big one. Congress has been delegating their power to the Executive for decades. Rather than meaningful law, they tell the Executive to make regulations that don’t stand the test of time. Congress needs to pass laws again, instead of delegating large swaths of their power.
I can see it being difficult to keep up with the law-writing given how much more complicated the world is now than when Congress was first established. To keep things working properly there should really be a whole lot more congressmen, Congress hasn’t been expanded in a long time and representation is starting to get pretty wonky as a result.
When you get right down to it, I think the root of the problem is just that the American system of governance is just too old. It was one of the first big democracies so it was built without any prior experience of what worked well and what didn’t, and the patches it’s had since it was established have been too minor and are too difficult to apply for it to keep up with things. But a large swath of the American public have been indoctrinated that American democracy is the “greatest in the world” and that the US constitution is a sacred document, so major changes are nigh on impossible even if American politics wasn’t in such a dysfunctionally divided state.
All in all, I’m glad not to be in their shoes right now. Though my own country (Canada) is having some political problems of its own these days they feel more resolvable than all this.
Expanding Congress won’t solve that. There’s only so many votes they can hold in a year and stuffing bills with ever more information and regulations means less and less time for a Representative or Senator to understand it, which reverts to team politics. We should absolutely expand Congress, but this isn’t a reason. Every well functioning government has non legislators promulgating regulations based off legislative guidance.
Exactly. Maybe the agencies should be joint legislative executive or something but we do need them, because I don’t want Jim fucking Jordan deciding how much lead is safe for baby food, but even worse would be for nobody to decide