RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Code of Federal Regulations comprises 50 titles, 235 volumes, over 200,000 pages, and over 1.1 million specific regulatory restrictions.  Imagine that if you can.

Regulations reach into every conceivable – and inconceivable – aspect of life.  Any new legislation passed by Congress is a statement of legal intention.  Regulations are the snarling legal fangs of that legislation, the nitty-gritty core of the law.  In practice, regulations are written by unelected and anonymous bureaucrats, “interested parties,” and lobbyists.  Also in practice, regulations are not reviewed by Congress.  Is it reasonable to expect our elected representatives to plow through 223 pages a day of tyrannical minutia (see below) when they don’t even bother to read the legislation that spawns it?

Let’s try to get a numerical handle on the magnitude of the federal regulations imposed during the seven and a half years of Obama’s reign, focusing on the last full year, 2015.  (The figures are deficient.  Like the national debt, they grow relentlessly, with no abatement.)

Untold numbers of unelected anonymous worker bees in offices public and private secretly, and without oversight, churning out over nine pages of new laws every hour, around the clock, ceaselessly, year after year.  Who needs Carroll, Kafka, or Orwell?