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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Laws are always going to have some ambiguities. And the executive -- which is tasked with implementing or enforcing the laws -- will thus always have some leeway, subject to judiciary oversight.

As an analogy, consider two cities subject to the same traffic regulations (that is laws). City A might say "we use traffic regulations to establish culpability after an accident, but do not prioritize on enforcing them ahead of fact". City B might go full 1984, having AI-powered cameras on every intersection and writing tickets for every missing turn signal.

Unless the law considers specific provisions for its enforcement (like "communities need to spend at least one police hour per resident per year on enforcing traffic regulations" or "traffic violations shall not be detected through autonomous camera systems"), both seem like valid interpretations, even though they will create very different environments.

If you are worried about the president having too much power by establishing law interpretations for their agencies, I think congress could establish agencies outside of administrative reach. Establish some other mechanism (appointment by congress, supreme court, popular vote) to determine who gets to head the EPA. This would likely cause more problems than it solves, though.