Heritage
Foundation
Congress’
Real Problem: They’re Letting Regulators Become Legislators
Rich
Tucker
March
3, 2014
Washington
D.C. won’t have John Dingell to push around much longer.
The
venerable Democrat, who’s been in the House of Representatives
since 1955, is preparing to retire and hand his family’s seat (his
father held it before him, having been elected in 1932) to his wife.
But he’s not doing her any favors.
In
recent years the problem isn’t that lawmakers have left the House.
It’s that they’ve stopped being lawmakers. Nobody has kept
Dingell – and his 434 elected colleagues — from legislating. The
fact that they don’t legislate is a self-inflicted wound. Congress
has willingly given up much of its lawmaking authority.
“In
terms of actual policy, most of the action is located in
administrative agencies and departments, not in the Congress and the
President as is commonly thought. Unelected bureaucrats—not elected
representatives—are running the show,” scholar Joe Postell notes.
Consider
several of the items Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus listed in
a recent column headlined, “Losing the art of legislating as John
Dingell retires”:
Clean
Air: Lawmakers are happy to pass policymaking about carbon dioxide to
the EPA.
Education
Reform: Lawmakers allow the Obama Administration to offer waivers to
replace the Congressionally-passed No Child Left Behind with Common
Core.
Health
Care: Lawmakers enacted Obamacare, but the bill was more aspiration
than law. Much of the actual policy is being crafted by the
Department of Health and Human Services. For his part, President
Obama has felt free to issue waivers at will.
Telecommunications:
The FCC is aggressively trying to expand its domain. It recently
floated a plan to put observers in newsrooms, even those of
newspapers and Web sites (which the agency doesn’t even regulate).
The
Constitution established a federal government of limited but
enumerated powers.
To
work, it requires lawmakers who are jealous of their power to make
law. If many long-serving Representatives are getting bored, maybe
it’s because they stopped being lawmakers years ago.
Read
this article with links at Heritage Foundation
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