Hold up: Parent-poster is obviously talking about federal regulations, not federal laws, and there are important differences between them... so why have you altered the quote to say [Laws]?
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
The regulations are [often] binding as law. When they change the regulations they are changing the law, under the fiction they're merely changing the interpretation of the law.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
Ah yes I forgot, they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break. Silly me.
> they're not "laws" just "rules" that the government will come after you if you break
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not. It's literally the same damn thing but with a different sized cartridge. Nothing in the statute would allow this, yet executive 'delegation' mumbo-jumbo and magically one is basically unregulated and the other is felonies out the ass if you start commercially selling them without a host of licensing and checks.
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
> I'd like to see someone explain why a .50 BMG bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is a firearm but a .556 bolt action upper receiver (AR-15 type) is not
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
The president has a large degree of control over the agencies and their output, so in practice agency delegation granted presidents immense power. This power went largely unexercised due to norms. But that has been slowly changing, and under Trump radically changing. And if SCOTUS adopts the Unitary Executive Theory, as they seem poised to do, then we'll have something very close to a king, difficult to distinguish from 18th century Great Britain.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
> don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
>If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
> That's a distinction without a difference
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:
>Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
> They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)