The Sunset Dawn The Lawmakers

The theory of representative government tells us that elected agents of the people write the law that governs our society and are held accountable for the outcome through the sanction of periodic voting. Events in Washington suggest that this conception is very far from the manner in which the national business is conducted. Congress is only marginally in charge of things, if it can be said to be in charge at all. The task of daily legislation is in fact performed by unelected officials of the Executive bureaucracy.

The principal reason for this anomaly is that the Federal Government is trying to do too many things, attempting to regulate in fine-grained fashion the workings of a vast economy embracing 220 million people. There is no possible way the countless variables involved in such an enterprise can be debated and resolved in legislative chambers. Thus, with increasing frequency, the lawmakers remand the problem to Executive agents, permitting them to draw up the rules by which society is regulated. The effects of this renunciation may be seen in the thousands of “regs” pumped out each day by Executive agents in the pages of the Federal Register.

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M. Stanton Evans

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The theory of representative government tells us that elected agents of the people write the law that governs our society and are held accountable for the outcome through the sanction of periodic voting. Events in Washington suggest that this conception is very far from the manner in which the national business is conducted. Congress is only marginally in charge of things, if it can be said to be in charge at all. The task of daily legislation is in fact performed by unelected officials of the Executive bureaucracy.

The principal reason for this anomaly is that the Federal Government is trying to do too many things, attempting to regulate in fine-grained fashion the workings of a vast economy embracing 220 million people. There is no possible way the countless variables involved in such an enterprise can be debated and resolved in legislative chambers. Thus, with increasing frequency, the lawmakers remand the problem to Executive agents, permitting them to draw up the rules by which society is regulated. The effects of this renunciation may be seen in the thousands of “regs” pumped out each day by Executive agents in the pages of the Federal Register.