3 ms·
On the flip side-- congress often will pass regulation with the very intent to allow ambiguity so that the regulatory agency will have extreme latitude often ag
by alfalfasprout 2y ago
On the flip side-- congress often will pass regulation with the very intent to allow ambiguity so that the regulatory agency will have extreme latitude often against the will of the people.
Or a regulatory agency will grossly stretch their mandate to overstep what they are effectively allowed to regulate and interpret.
Since there effectively minimal judicial checks and balances against that behavior that's also not desirable either. Just look at the farcical interpretations from the ATF in recent years that have sent innocent folks to prison for having a completely non-functional design of a gun part on a business card to prison. Or classifying a shoe string as a machine gun. These folks have had little to no recourse in court due to the ATF's broad unchecked discretion.
- vundercind 2y agoTo anyone wondering, to save you some googling: yes, both the mentioned instances aren’t obviously-unreasonable in context. One was someone formally asking the ATF whether it’d be illegal if they made a machine gun with a shoe string, and would that shoe string then be an illegal machine gun part and the ATF going “yeah, duh” and the other was someone seeing exactly how close they could get to selling machine gun conversion parts without crossing the line, and the karmic principle of FAFO kicked in.