> Congress and the Constitution give wide latitude to the executive branch to administer laws.
Depends on what you mean by "wide latitude". Article II says that the President shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed. But it doesn't say the President or any Executive branch official can make laws. And most of what Executive branch agencies do in our current administrative state is making laws. Sure, they're called "regulations" and everybody waves their hands and says Congress makes "laws" that give guidelines on how the "regulations" are written, but that's just playing with words. You can be fined or sent to jail for violating the "regulations", and that makes them laws. Which means they are supposed to be passed by Congress using the process given in the Constitution.
> this is a bad faith argument
I'm not sure what argument you are talking about here, but it's not mine. My argument is simply that the current administrative state is unconstitutional. That is not the same as saying our current administrative state makes bad laws--in fact I do think many of the laws it makes are bad, but that's not the argument I'm making here. The argument I'm making is that if as a democratic society we decide that the best way for our government to run is as an administrative state like the one we have now, we need to amend the Constitution to allow that. Otherwise we do not have a rule of law, because we're ignoring what the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, says. Claiming that we need these regulations because safety, environment, blah blah blah does not change that.
> Which means they are supposed to be passed by Congress using the process given in the Constitution.
And Congress passed laws granting those executive departments some latitude on what it is they are allowed to enforce. It'd be one thing if most of their regulations were widely overreaching, but "don't dump fertilizer in the Missouri River Basin so that we don't have mass die-offs of aquatic life" seems fairly reasonable.
> Otherwise we do not have a rule of law, because we're ignoring what the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, says. Claiming that we need these regulations because safety, environment, blah blah blah does not change that.
It's absolutely rule of law. The people elected Congress, Congress passed a law, people elected electors for the Presidency, who hired bureaucrats to carry out the law within reasonable latitude.
What isn't rule of law is when some company gets to roll into a working-class town, dump a ton of chemicals, make people empty their savings to treat chronic illnesses that said chemicals caused, and tell the victims to take a hike because the EPA no longer has any authority because of regulatory capture. That's the rule of market, and that gets messy. Really messy.
If you want people to take the law into their own hands, by all means, continue decaying the system that was set up because of a myopic view of some document written by a bunch of slaveholders.
> Congress passed laws granting those executive departments some latitude on what it is they are allowed to enforce
No, the current administrative state goes far beyond that. Executive branch agencies are writing "regulations", which are actually laws, directly, not just exercising discretion about how to enforce the laws that Congress writes.
> It'd be one thing if most of their regulations were widely overreaching, but "don't dump fertilizer in the Missouri River Basin so that we don't have mass die-offs of aquatic life" seems fairly reasonable.
If Congress thinks that's a reasonable law, it needs to write that law. It cannot Constitutionally delegate the power to write that law to an Executive Branch agency. The Constitution would need to be amended to allow Congress to do that, and it hasn't been.
> What isn't rule of law is when some company gets to roll into a working-class town, dump a ton of chemicals, make people empty their savings to treat chronic illnesses that said chemicals caused, and tell the victims to take a hike because the EPA no longer has any authority because of regulatory capture.
In other words, the government regulations you applaud, in addition to being unconstitutional, do not actually work. Yes, indeed regulatory capture is a thing--and it happens because we have ignored the Constitutional limitations on what laws Congress can pass and allowed legislative power to be transferred to unelected bureaucrats who are much easier to capture than elected representatives and whose activities are much harder for we the voters to control.
> If you want people to take the law into their own hands, by all means, continue decaying the system that was set up because of a myopic view of some document written by a bunch of slaveholders.
If you don't want to live under the US Constitution, go move to some other country. "Rule of law" means you can't just ignore laws you don't like. The Constitution, whether you like it or not, is the supreme law of the land here in the US, and it does not allow Congress to pass any law it likes; it puts restrictions on what laws Congress can pass. To change those restrictions the Constitution needs to be amended, as it already has been twenty-seven times--one of which was to abolish slavery.
Depends on what you mean by "wide latitude". Article II says that the President shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed. But it doesn't say the President or any Executive branch official can make laws. And most of what Executive branch agencies do in our current administrative state is making laws. Sure, they're called "regulations" and everybody waves their hands and says Congress makes "laws" that give guidelines on how the "regulations" are written, but that's just playing with words. You can be fined or sent to jail for violating the "regulations", and that makes them laws. Which means they are supposed to be passed by Congress using the process given in the Constitution.
> this is a bad faith argument
I'm not sure what argument you are talking about here, but it's not mine. My argument is simply that the current administrative state is unconstitutional. That is not the same as saying our current administrative state makes bad laws--in fact I do think many of the laws it makes are bad, but that's not the argument I'm making here. The argument I'm making is that if as a democratic society we decide that the best way for our government to run is as an administrative state like the one we have now, we need to amend the Constitution to allow that. Otherwise we do not have a rule of law, because we're ignoring what the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, says. Claiming that we need these regulations because safety, environment, blah blah blah does not change that.