Today it is evident that promises of apolitical rule-making have gone unrealized and that delegation of legislative authority is not the exception but the rule. Worse still, the dream of an impartial, virtuoso-driven bureaucracy has been cast aside in favor of monarchism. In 2015, the bureaucracy does not exist as a hive of expertise held aside from the hurly-burly of partisanship and ideology, but as a weapon that is wielded by the incumbent executive and insulated from congressional pushback. From the Reagan administration onwards, American presidents have come to use their control of federal agencies as kings once used their crowns. If a given commander-in-chief doesn’t like the substance of a given law, he claims that it is vague and issues a new rule to “fix” it; if his signature legislative achievement isn’t working so well, he suspends or dispenses with its unpopular or problematic provisions until the politics improve, regardless of whether the statute accords him such discretion; if the other branches will not play ball, he fulfills their roles for them.

Worse, he is aided and abetted in doing so by the very institutions the Constitution anticipated would stop him. In theory, Congress should be able to limit the bureaucracy’s potency by repealing or amending its grants of power and by limiting the types of instances in which it subdelegates its judgment. In practice, the rise of ideologically unified parties has rendered this an impossibility. When Congress and the White House are run by politicians with the same aims, there is little incentive to roll back the frontiers of executive authority. And when they are not, the dissenters hardly ever have the votes to override the president’s veto. If Americans wish to change the status quo, they will need to start electing politicians who are as committed to protecting the powers of their branch as they are to their agendas (this will be extremely difficult) and to insist that oversight legislation such as the REINS Act (which forces Congress to take a vote on especially expensive regulations) makes it into law.