more closely confined.................

 

     While he was an early advocate for administrative power, Justice William O. Douglas explained that later in life he came to "realize that Congress defaulted when it left it up to an agency to do what the 'public interest' indicated should be done. 'Public interest' is too vague a standard to be left to free-wheeling administrators.  They should be more closely confined to specific ends or goals."  But that wish, too, seems now a world away.  If laws governing major facets of our society were once largely the work of elected representatives and the product of democratic compromises, nowadays they often represent only the current thinking of relatively insulated agency officials in a distant city.  It's a result that, as Justice Willliam J. Brennan, Jr., once observed, can post a quandary:  "Whereas the colonists challenged the king, today's citizens may find it impossible to know exactly who is responsible."

-Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law