“........a Presidents real power lies in his or hers ability to manipulate Congress to achieve their goals and if the majority of Congress is made up with people of the Presidents party the road is generally much smoother.......”

Up until recently I would have agreed with you. The President’s ability to make the appointments for the heads of agencies with regulatory powers can give him a great deal of power to slip rules and regulations (laws) into place without much public discussion or debate.

Of course the appointment of Judges to the Supreme Court will have a long term effect on how laws are interpreted even after a President leaves office, but agency heads also set the tone for rules and regulations that are put into place that also have long term repercussions.

The unfortunate thing is often the heads of these agencies while they may be somewhat competent managers often don’t have a clue about what it is really like out in the real world they are proposing rules for.

It’s a lot easier for an agency to enact a law than it is to get it appealed afterward. Look at the monsters that agencies (which were originally well intentioned) have become. Agencies like EPA, OHSA, Dept of Labor, Department of Transportation etc. Every year these agencies become bigger and enact more and more laws that often that slip under the radar until it is too late.

What got me thinking along these lines were the recently proposed child labor laws that seemed to be slipping thru until some people sat up and took notice.

The new regulations were directed at children working on family farms (like I grew up on) and in part included.

“…..Two different Federal Agencies have proposed rules within the past year that would each have a devastating effect on family farms. The first was the Department of Transportation which proposed a rule to require that all operators of farm equipment must have a commercial driver’s license even when driving on their own land.

The second is a Department of Labor rule to prevent children from doing farm chores. The rule would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

These new rules from two different Federal Agencies were announced within the past year and then withdrawn, as recently as last week, after the administration saw the public outrage over the proposed rules.

Why are family farms coming under attack by Federal Agencies? Well one clue can be found in Obama’s recent speeches where he calls Capitalism a “failed policy of the past”…….”

Just my 2 cents..........I will now get down from the soap box.

By the way here is the first article I read that started my train of thought on this.

Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores - Yahoo! News