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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Congress has passed laws delegating authority about certain aspects of a certain section of laws to these agencies because they can react faster.

You and I both know congress won’t be able to do anything, which effectively means a ruling against these would kill all federal regulations.

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>You and I both know congress won’t be able to do anything

Why is this relevant? This is like complaining that an alarm feature doesn't exist when it's not clear who would actually do anything if the alarm ever went off.

Because the country has people relying on it to keep them safe?

No system the size of a state is perfect, and heck I don't think what is being proposed here is perfection. I do not want to wait for a very slow-moving-system to decide if, say, an ingredient is a threat to human health.

If you say we should fix this by a constitutional amendment to allow federal agencies to operate the way they are now? Sure! However in the meantime I'm not going to advocate for breaking the current system and extending suffering for people just to follow a documented written centuries ago.

If our government can’t accomplish the most basic tasks of being a government without violating our constitution, then we should just admit we are a failed state and disband.

The US constitution isn't a holy relic handed down by Zeus; it's an extremely compromised document based on the political needs, concerns, and compromises of 1787, helpfully but inadequately amended over the last 200-some years. The worst parts are the anti-democratic features originally put in place to protect the interests of the sparsely-populated slaver states. Inasmuch as we have a functional government today, it's because the functions we need have been taken up by agencies neither required nor forbidden by the constitution, but generally created by enabling laws for the executive branch. You can't just throw those things away unless you are willing to adopt a completely new constitution written to meet modern needs.

> we should just admit we are a failed state and disband

What??? That sounds like the newly-hired dev who says, "I want to rewrite the entire code base, because this time we'll do it right!" Yeah, sure ....

I do not want to actually live in a system where _elected non expert_ people are making decisions for health, communications, space travel rules, internet access, business rules, agriculture, flight regulations, etc.

Someone getting elected is not qualified to make these decisions. They are however, somewhat qualified to represent the will of the people they represent by setting up agencies with missions to address these problems that hires experts to solve them.

Our country has a lot of failures. Executive agencies are not one of them.

Our constitution creates a republic, governed by elected representatives. Not an expertocracy where our elected representatives simply serve to appoint and facilitate the work of Harvard graduates who actually run the country.

The rightful government is the one the Constitution created, not the pretender to the throne we have now.

"By your fruits ye shall know them." One could venture that most people care far less about a government's fidelity to any particular abstract written standard than they do about whether the government does an acceptable job keeping things running.

Ah yes, that would certainly be far better.

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