CQ Researcher: The Supreme Court: Will Americans regain their trust in it?
These excerpts are from a piece that originally ran on December 16, 2022.
“I find myself straining to figure out how it is they reach the conclusions they do,” says Rakim Brooks, the president of the Washington-based progressive advocacy group Alliance for Justice.
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Brooks says that type of increased public attention and engagement may be a good thing. “Right now, our third branch of government is probably the branch of government least familiar to the American public,” he says.
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Rakim Brooks, president of the Washington-based progressive advocacy group Alliance for Justice, admits that legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), which aimed to prevent banks and lenders from discriminating against low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, is brief. “Yet, there are tons and tons of regulations that have connections to CRA and have come out of different departments,” he says.
Congress does not have staff with expertise to write detailed regulations, Brooks says. Instead, the executive branch, with its more than 2 million civilian employees, crafts the rules enforcing the intent of statutes that Congress enacts.
The court’s rulings, Brooks says, suggest that, instead, Congress must go back and fill in every detail about regulations, “every time a gap is seen in a law…. So you see the massive inefficiencies that would create. Everything slowly grinds to a halt under this theory.”