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Comment by radley | Hacker News Reader

> It's about the ambiguity of law. If anything, they'll need to rely on more expertise now, so they can craft laws that aren't open to interpretation.

I doubt that granting Congress more power will inspire them to be less political, more responsible, and more governed by facts. Particularly when the party that made this decision has veered completely in the opposite direction.

If anything, it will be used to prioritize "faith" over fact, like what we've seen in Oklahoma and Mississippi.

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Congress isn't being granted more power here. They're being granted more (their original) responsibility.

Or... they are losing their power to delegate details to other parties when they choose to do so.

They can still delegate. They just need to be more specific in what powers they are delegating and to whom. The people they delegate to cannot give themselves more power than they were originally given.

> I doubt that granting Congress more power will inspire them to be less political,

I'm not sure I can wrap my head around the expectation that a political institution should be 'less political' -- can you explain what you are getting at here?

> more governed by facts.

Fact substantiate 'is', but politics is about 'ought', and particularly, reconciling the contradictory 'ought's that prevail in varying quarters of society. Expecting politics to be 'governed by facts' requires taking a single set of values and interests for granted, which effectively means codifying one faction's ambitions into law at the expense of everyone else.

> doubt that granting Congress more power will inspire them to be less political

Now imagine what unelected government officials who play the revolving doors game with the industry they're supposed to regulate can do.

If that party can win elections by doing that, that’s what should happen. “Expertise” carries zero weight in a democracy other than its ability to persuade voters.

> Expertise carries zero weight in a democracy other than it's ability to persuade voters.

Would you rather the "holistic healer" who says only drinking green juice for a week to "detox" your kidneys make laws? Or the person who actually went to med school for 12 years.

> If that party can win elections by doing that, that’s what should happen. “Expertise” carries zero weight in a democracy other than its ability to persuade voters.

That's a pretty idealized view: The vast majority of voters just want competent governance, with guard rails to make sure the governors don't go too far, because they (the voters) have lives to live and other things on their minds.

As to persuading voters, we should remember the joke about Islamist parties' agitation for "democracy": One man, one vote — once.

No, it’s fundamental to what democracy means and is.

If we wanted “competent governance” we would just have China or Singapore run our country.

It's a spectrum, not a binary choice.

Or... just hear me out... we could hire experts in various fields, give them general principles to follow, let them work out the details, give them the authority to enforce it, and maintain the right to step in if they overreach.

But yeah, "opinions are greater than facts" is technically a very democratic way to do things.

But historically, it ends up causing a great deal of harm.

As an aside, I've always wondered how society will drive the response to climate change into a ditch - it'll be at the hands of lawyers (because, you know, they are policy experts).

You’re looking at it. One of the main goals of this push is utterly defanging agencies like the EPA

If this defangs the EPA then it needed de-fanging. If the EPA can't make a better case for a rule than "my way or the highway" then it's a bad rule.

The EPA can make the most reasonable rule possible, based on available facts, expertise, and public consultation, and have it overturned by a handful of judicial partisans on behalf of people willing to throw money at litigation. I think we'll see a huge increase in forum shopping and demands for injunctive relief designed to grind any kind of regulatory action on any topic to a halt. In many cases litigants will bring cases without any expectation or intention of succeeding on the merits, but rather with the sole goal of tying things up in court for the duration of an electoral cycle.

From the mouth of John Roberts himself: "courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority." This is not going to end well.

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