Washington D.C. won’t have John Dingell to push around much longer. The venerable Democrat, who’s been in the House of Representatives since 1955, is preparing to retire and hand his family’s seat (his father held it before him, having been elected in 1932) to his wife. But he’s not doing her any favors. In recent years the problem isn’t that lawmakers have left the House. It’s that they’ve stopped being lawmakers. Nobody has kept Dingell – and his 434 elected colleagues — from legislating. The fact that they don’t legislate is a self-inflicted wound. Congress has willingly given up much of its lawmaking authority. “In terms of actual policy, most of the action is located in administrative agencies and departments, not in the Congress and the President as is commonly thought. Unelected bureaucrats—not elected representatives—are running the show,” scholar Joe Postell notes. Consider several of the items Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus listed in a recent column headlined, “Losing the art of legislating as John Dingell retires”:
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:01:49 +0000
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