JUSTICE NEWS

Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, November 17, 2017
Attorney General Jeff Sessions Ends the Department’s Practice of Regulation by Guidance

Today, in an action to further uphold the rule of law in the executive branch, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo prohibiting the Department of Justice from issuing guidance documents that have the effect of adopting new regulatory requirements or amending the law. The memo prevents the Department of Justice from evading required rulemaking processes by using guidance memos to create de facto regulations.

In the past, the Department of Justice and other agencies have blurred the distinction between regulations and guidance documents. Under the Attorney General’s memo, the Department may no longer issue guidance documents that purport to create rights or obligations binding on persons or entities outside the Executive Branch.

The Attorney General’s Regulatory Reform Task Force, led by Associate Attorney General Brand, will conduct a review of existing Department documents and will recommend candidates for repeal or modification in the light of this memo’s principles.

“Guidance documents can be used to explain existing law,” Associate Attorney General Brand said. “But they should not be used to change the law or to impose new standards to determine compliance with the law. The notice-and-comment process that is ordinarily required for rulemaking can be cumbersome and slow, but it has the benefit of availing agencies of more complete information about a proposed rule’s effects than the agency could ascertain on its own. This Department of Justice will not use guidance documents to circumvent the rulemaking process, and we will proactively work to rescind existing guidance documents that go too far.”

Source

Big thumbs up!

Even the weak sister of Trump appointments, Mr. Sessions, is doing good works.

Another win.

Now extend that to every other regulatory agency, starting with EPA and their IRIS database.

I've spent my career fighting this guidance-masquerading-as-regulation hydra and it's about fucking time someone at the top ended this practice.

The flip side is it means regulatory agencies will need to hire competent people, but that's going to mean kicking out a metric shit ton of political science majors, lawyers, and gender-fluidity communications arts majors.

Sessions may, MAY, have just redeemed himself with me.

The next GDC will just start it again.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
The next GDC will just start it again.

Yea, but a few years of blis can be therapeutic.

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
The next GDC will just start it again.

Yea, but a few years of blis can be therapeutic.

Perhaps. But it feels like unilateral disarmament to me.

The practice should be permanently stopped by both sides through a change in the law. That will not happen if the Left never suffers turn-about.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
The practice should be permanently stopped by both sides through a change in the law.

I sometimes think about what provisions I would include if I were rewriting the Constitution from scratch. I believe this would be a good one to include.

I finally got around to reading The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek and where I am now he addresses this very point at length. He doesn’t call it legislation by regulation, but it describes it clearly and its pernicious effects on the Rule of Law. The book was written 75 years ago, so it’s not as if no one was warning about what would happen as a result of the practice.

Hayek also wrote that "Social Justice" is not justice at all.

Link to Amazon: Mirage of Social Justice