Whose job is it?

In the Aspen Times, Glenn Beaton wrote a piece yesterday about the Supreme Court.

...This system has worked well for over two centuries. But over the past few decades the job of these justices has gotten harder. To their detriment and ours, we now ask too much of them.

We now ask the Court to decide, for example, whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant and whether contraceptive benefits should be mandated for Catholic nuns. Those issues wound up before the Court because Congress refused to decide them. Instead, Congress delegated the decision to unaccountable administrators at the EPA and unelected bureaucrats at the IRS.

These are not issues of law, but issues of policy. Congress dodges them for craven political reasons. They want to avoid disappointing one or another of their constituent groups. Congress does this because it works — for Congress.

The people are not blind to this game. That's why they overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress as a whole. But they still allow themselves to be seduced by their own representatives over and over at election time. Being seduced is destructive but seductive.

It's a failure of democracy, and it's our own fault.

Congress's abdication to the Court now risks the Court's reputation upon which its authority rests. The current justices — and also newly nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh — are extremely talented judges and very decent human beings. But they are only so-so policymakers and, moreover, they are unaccountable to the people.

Let's restore democracy. A good start would be for the Court to invalidate vague legislation that illegitimately delegates policy-making to unaccountable administrative agencies for review by unelected judges.

That would force Congress to make the hard policy decisions. That's Congress' job.

And it would force us to hold Congress accountable for those decisions at election time. That's our job.

Read more here.