Here's how Congress is SUPPOSED to work: the House passes a bill on some issue, and the Senate passes a bill on the same issue, which is probably different. Then there is a conference committee formed of House and Senate members, with the two parties represented proportionally. They hammer out a compromise that they think everyone can live with, and that bill goes back to both the House and Senate and usually is passed. Now, guess which branch of Congress doesn't want to do it the way it has been done for the past 200 or more years? That's right, your friends in the House. They want the Senate to pass THEIR bill and they refuse to compromise. So who is really the obstructionist?

And yes, I do think everyone is as stupid as I am.

Here's how Congress is SUPPOSED to work: the House passes a bill on some issue, and the Senate passes a bill on the same issue, which is probably different. Then there is a conference committee formed of House and Senate members, with the two parties represented proportionally. They hammer out a compromise that they think everyone can live with, and that bill goes back to both the House and Senate and usually is passed. Now, guess which branch of Congress doesn't want to do it the way it has been done for the past 200 or more years? That's right, your friends in the House. They want the Senate to pass THEIR bill and they refuse to compromise. So who is really the obstructionist?

And yes, I do think everyone is as stupid as I am.

If you read the article, it is the various departments, like defense, t***sportation, hhs, etc., that are supposed to forward these rules. So it is not Obama himself or his office that is responsible for this. But as the article said, if the law were strictly followed, it would overwhelm the congressional committees with paperwork.

If we had a congress that functioned as it should, the law could be improved. Just as congress could fix some problems with Obamacare if the Republicans were willing to make it work better instead of repeatedly trying to repeal it. I think this quote from the comment on the linked article makes a lot of sense:

"The law passed in Bush's final months, which got a unanimous v**e in both houses, to grant unaccompanied children who arrived in the US illegally from anywhere but Mexico and Canada a court hearing before deportation [envisioned as striking a blow a the child sex trafficing business] is what created the current problem with thousands of central American children who've arrived here and cannot be deported without being given a court hearing first. Law of Unintended Consequences. Ditto the Newt Gingrich sponsored bill discussed in the article above. Not working as intended and never has. A functional Congress could fix the problem in relatively short order. But we don't have a functional Congress just now. Ironic that the purported "Get the government off our backs" Gingrich led House created a "reform" law that hugely increased government paperwork [and so staff to do it]."

WASHINGTON — Over the past two years, the Obama administration has published hundreds and hundreds of rules — on how wheelchairs should be stowed aboard U.S. aircraft, how foreign trade zones should be regulated, how v****g assistance should be provided for U.S. citizens overseas, and so on.

There’s a problem, however: Technically speaking, these and some 1,800 other regulations shouldn’t be in effect because they weren’t reported to Congress as required. Yet there is little that lawmakers or the courts can do about it.

http://www.standard.net/National/2014/07/29/Study-Hundreds-of-rules-passed-by-Obama-administration-are-technically-illegal.html