As Obama begins his second term, all the talk in Washington is about whether ongoing congressional gridlock and soul-crushing partisanship will block the administration from achieving significant legislative victories, be they immigration reform, a big fiscal deal, or an infrastructure bank. But at least as important to the future of the country and to the president’s own legacy is whether that potentially game-changing legislation he signed in his first term—like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, as well as a slew of other landmark bills—is actually implemented at all.
It may seem counterintuitive, but those big hunks of legislation, despite being technically the law of the land, filed away in the federal code, don’t mean anything yet. They are, in the words of one CFTC official, “nothing but words on paper” until they’re broken down into effective rules, implemented, and enforced by an agency. Rules are where the rubber of our legislation hits the road of real life. To put that another way, if a rule emerges from a regulatory agency weak or riddled with loopholes, or if it’s killed entirely—like the CFTC’s rule on position limits—it is, in effect, almost as if that part of the law had not passed to begin with.
As of now, there’s no guarantee that either Obamacare or Dodd-Frank will be made into rules that actually do what lawmakers intended. That’s partly because the rule-making process is a dangerous place for a law to go. We might imagine it as a fairly boring assembly line—a series of gray-faced bureaucrats diligently stamping laws into rules—but in reality, it’s more of a treacherous, whirling-hatchet-lined gauntlet. There are three main areas on this gauntlet where a rule can be sliced, diced, gouged, or otherwise weakened beyond recognition.
The first is in the agency itself, where industry lobbyists enjoy outsized influence in meetings and comment letters, on rule makers’ access to vital information, and on the interpretation of the law itself.
The second is in court, where industry groups can sue an agency and have a rule killed on a variety of grounds, some of which make sense and some of which most definitely do not.
The third is in Congress, where an entire law can be retroactively gutted or poked through with loopholes, or where an agency can be quietly starved to death through appropriations bills.
And here’s the really alarming part: rules run this gauntlet largely behind closed doors, supervised by people we don’t elect, whose names we don’t know, while neither the media nor great swaths of the otherwise informed public are paying any attention at all. That’s not because we don’t care what happens; we do. After all, millions of us spent the better part of a year closely monitoring the battles to pass Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Remember? It was high drama! Every detail was faithfully chronicled in front-page headlines and long disquisitions on The Rachel Maddow Show; in countless posts by wonky bloggers, who dissected every in and out, every committee hearing, every new study about the public option or the Volcker Rule.
