The Supreme Court conservatives, exuding the heady self-confidence of a team that knows it cannot lose, haven’t been coy about the jurisprudence they want to reshape or tear down.
Agencies have the expertise and nimbleness to pass regulations and make rules that Congress lacks. Today’s Congress, nearly inoperable thanks to the Senate filibuster and hyperpartisanship, can hardly muster the effort to pass a handful of laws every year. Imagine tasking the legislative branch with passing a new law every time an agency wants to tweak a regulation about factory protocols or carry out an affordable housing program — the vision dreamt of by nondelegation advocates.
Those advocates, some of whom currently sit on the Supreme Court, maintain that rulemaking through the agencies, nestled in the executive branch, is undemocratic: the officials who staff the agencies are elected by no one, after all.
One might want to inform SCOTUS new and old right-wingers, that they are not elected either.