While most of us planned a Thanksgiving celebration with food and family, progressive government minions planned yet another round of regulations designed to tighten the straitjacket on Americans, their lives and their businesses.
More than 2000 government agency rules in various stages of completion were released on the Friday before Thanksgiving, and they cover an array of mandates from "Use of Mobile Wireless Devices for Voice Calls on Aircraft" to "Ski Area Definition-Land Uses, Special Uses (Rule)."
Lest Americans think regulations are less constraining than laws, consider George Mason School of Law professor Neomi Rao's short explanation of how the "administrative state" constantly expands through an "unholy combination" of massive legislative delegation to agencies combined with courts that defer to agency interpretations:
Unlike laws debated openly in state and federal legislatures in full view of all Americans, regulations are the hidden playground of special interest groups and K Street lobbyists, who understand the government regulatory process and use it to heavily influence the rules that Americans are forced to live under.
The American Action Forum, a center-right organization that catalogues and assesses costs of government regulations, notes that the Obama Administration has already issued more than 72,898 pages of regulations in 2015—proposed rules that will cost Americans 90.9 billion dollars and final rules that cost Americans $92.1 billion dollars. These touch all areas of American life, as the AAF chart shows:
Federal and state legislatures have the authority to rein in the "administrative state" and its rules, and it’s long past time they did so.