Laura

Better yet, build the Web Press and expose the corruption and elect people who will fix the system and not be beholden to corporate money. Maybe use the Justice Department to break up the monopolies. Now there’s a muckraking, trust busting idea…

Bottom line, the federal administrative regulators are effectively legislators, police officers, prosecutors, judges and juries all rolled into one. Easier to corrupt? Yes.

The founders separated the legislative, executive and judicial functions precisely because if those functions are combined, the inevitable result is abuse of power and corruption. It is far more difficult to corrupt three independent authorities for a particular purpose than one semi-omnipotent one.

Those with faith that “if only the right people were in charge” or “if only they would enforce the laws as written” should take note that federal civil service protections guarantee that nearly all high-level bureaucrats will continue in office for decades and that the theoretically-protective laws themselves provide for the fundamentally flawed system of combined legislative-executive-judicial authority.

There is little chance that the present administrative law system, given those parameters, can result in anything other than the kind of results we see today. The only way to achieve the goal of environmental protection is to get it out of the hands of administrative “czars” and into the hands of local juries and courts under common law nuisance protections.

Otherwise, we will be having this same debate ten or twenty years from now and the situation will be pretty much the same, or worse.