This means that if those making public decisions pursue folly, they pay a price at election time.
Irrespective of whether this specific idea is a wise one, the notion of un-elected bureaucrats making policy with broad effect should terrify us.
Also worrisome is the abdication of proper legislative power by Congress.
Doing so before you bring up an absurd talking point that is always trotted out when someone is held to account by a regulatory agency to pay for the damages they doing to their neighbors.
You can call the reality of the situation "absurd" all day, but you'll not be driving much improvement.
As elsewhere in the thread, I find this point mostly theoretical.
You could say with an equally straight face that Congress could balance the budget any old time it wants to.
You could also point to some quantum mechanical statistical possibility of a fored bullet passing through its target.
There will be no improvement in the collapsed political situation before us until we get past discussing hypotheticals and set about reform.
The only weird thing going on here is that one person in the conversation has pointed all these facts out, but then for some reason thinks it would be awesome to force Congress to micromanage the entire government through legislation rather than explicitly delegating the detailed enforcement to other branches. That’s the part I don’t get. If you’re going to push for Congress to run every element of our vast Federal government, stop providing devastating arguments that undermine your case.
The debt, for one example, is so large that it is just a Really Big Number.
Do you think that the U.S. Government accidentally created perpetual motion with the Constitution, and that none of the real-world effects outside of those ~4k words matter?
And in this particular case, this isn't even remotely a bad ruling. The inability for markets to properly price in their negative externalities is the reason for our current looming crisis, and making up for the failures of markets by properly imposing those externalities is one of the most important roles of government.
Console yourself with this theoretical point, by all means.
Maybe the congress should do this with everything. The president can just make any rule he wants. Or maybe congress should just do their job instead of just delegating away all of their responsibility.
High time for an Article V re-write.