Gradually getting the masses accustomed to the muddying of the distinctions between the three branches of government

Very important Charles C. W. Cooke piece at NRO today on the recent trend toward crafting legislation that is open-ended and leaves much - way too much - to the discretion of cabinet-level department secretaries, executive-branch agencies, and regulation-happy bureaucrats.  Cooke cites FHer-care, Dodd-Frank and the current approach to immigration as glaring examples.

Obamacare, which makes the Senate’s immigration bill look like an exercise in legislative restraint, contains over 2,500 references to the secretary’s discretion, 700 cases in which the secretary “shall,” 200 instances in which the secretary “may,” and 139 cases in which the secretary “determines.” Its twin, Dodd-Frank, which effectively allows an unelected Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police the personal-finance sector, is little different, aggregating the power of the three branches into one, stripping Congress of its traditional capacity to set an agency’s budget and severely limiting the courts’ opportunity to review the CFPB’s legal interpretations. This is law, Jim — but not as we know it.

Have we become so inured to this blurring of boundaries that we think nothing of this kind of statement?

“If you look at the polling” on Obamacare, David Axelrod explained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, “the majority of the people say let’s move forward and fix it along the way — and that’s exactly what the president will do.” This, to say the least, is a rather novel theory of the American political system. Whether the “majority of the people say let’s move forward” on a particular project or not is rarely the salient question. The United States is a republic. It is not a monarchy, it is not a majoritarian democracy, and it is certainly not a direct democracy. Its highest value, in fact, is “nomocratic” — that is to say, that the rule of law and the overarching constitutional system trumps pretty much everything else.

As Cooke points out, the way the regime sells this stuff is by portraying every issue as being so pressing and so urgently requiring governmental action, that we're perfectly justified in dispensing with Constitutional niceties.

It has to stop.