@jerv
Actually SOPA is a good example of how all this is going. Generally a government agency is defined to handle the regulations (probably the FCC). They take the law and start creating regulations. What qualifies as piracy, what actions to take how much is shut down, etc. All this of course reports directly to the President. The end result is that the President has direct control over what Internet content is deemed acceptable.
Now I don’t care what party the president is from, I don’t want that power to reside in the president. There are 456 different agencies within the Federal Government. Most reporting directly to the President. Each of these agencies contain sub groups of bureaucracies and all of these create regulations and none of these are elected officials. Most Americans don’t even know they exist, let alone what they do. But make no mistake, every time they decide on a new regulation it carries the weight of law with appropriate fines, fees, or prison. There is no check on these guys, no oversight, and they do the bidding of the President.
Now I know that people like @ETpro believe that Obama is a good guy so transferring even more power to him is OK. But it’s not the party that scares me, it’s the transfer of power. During the Cap n Trade debate, the EPA threatened congress to pass that bill. Stating that if congress didn’t pass restrictions on CO2 that the EPA would. How the hell, does the EPA (reporting directly to the President) usurp the authority of congress? How can the President take the power to regulate CEO pay by simply appointing a Pay Czar? How can the NLRB acquire the power to dictate where an American business locate a new plant?
For all the Democrats that think this power grab is OK because it’s Obama, remember that he will eventually be ousted (unless he decides to eliminate the term limits) and the next guy will inherit all this new power. When you place all the power in one person, that is an authoritarian government. You may think the dictator is a good guy so that is OK but it rarely remains that way. We have transferred way too much power to the President. It’s time to start dismantling some of these agencies and put the power back into the hands of congress. They may be inept, but at least they are fairly well distributed, making a dictatorship more difficult.