As many of us know, the real progressive fight is the fight against corporatism. Part of this is the fight to rebuild and maintain a now-hemorrhaging wall of separation between government and big business. The other part is the fight against preferential treatment of corporations in statutes and regulations, across the entire range of portfolios and often to the great detriment of individuals.
What the Bush administration is attempting in its last days is an example of what we're up against in that second part of the fight.
WSJ
Bush administration officials, in their last weeks in office, are pushing to rewrite a wide array of federal rules with changes or additions that could block product-safety lawsuits by consumers and states.
The administration has written language aimed at pre-empting product-liability litigation into 50 rules governing everything from motorcycle brakes to pain medicine.
More below the fold.
This year, lawsuit-protection language has been added to 10 new regulations, including one issued Oct. 8 at the Department of Transportation that limits the number of seatbelts car makers can be forced to install and prohibits suits by injured passengers who didn't get to wear one.
These new rules can't quickly be undone by order of the next president. Federal rules usually must go through lengthy review processes before they are changed.
That implies that the changes earlier this year went through lengthy review processes, and that the 50 proposed changes will undergo lengthy review processes before they become effective.
Could be. We have regular diaries here on Daily Kos about what's going on in Congress, but we don't seem to have any systematic coverage of regulatory hearings in the many agencies of the executive branch. In fact, nobody seems to be providing that kind of systematic coverage, even though regulatory law can have just as much impact on the lives of individuals as statutory law.
The reason for that gap in coverage is a fairly simple result of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. Only a truly enormous and diverse organization would be capable of monitoring (much less correcting) the regulatory policy output of the executive branch. They don't call it a 'juggernaut' for nothing.
If you're not aware of the problem, take a look at the Code of Federal Regulations, which is where that executive regulatory output -- including the product safety rules mentioned above -- is collected. Spend a few years browsing the CFR, or search for some of your favorite terms, like, oh, I dunno, 'persimmon'.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those corporatist "libertarians" agitating for tiny government so that big business can get on with its program of raping the planet and its inhabitants even more unhindered than they already are. Effective government regulation is a necessity, as I've argued in earlier diaries. But the current state of Byzantine legalism has got to go, because nobody -- literally nobody -- can keep up with it for any length of time. If the people can't stay abreast of what the executive branch is doing, then the process is undemocratic and has to be fixed.
How can the Byzantine CFR get fixed without bringing the rule of law crashing down around us? There is, in fact, one agency of the federal government whose task is precisely to conduct research on what the executive branch is doing and to make recommendations for improvement. That agency is in the legislative branch, sensibly enough, and it's called the Government Accountability Office (previously the Government Accounting Office).
A new, progressive Congress should direct (and fund) the GAO to begin a systematic deconstruction of the CFR and to produce a catalog of recommendations for its simplification.
In the meantime, I think I'll put off starting a persimmon orchard.