This week the House is preoccupied with the budget, as the Senate was last week. The budget is probably the most important thing they do over there, not only because it’s pretty much the only thing the state constitution requires them to do, but perhaps even more so because it funds the organs of the state that increasingly actually do the job of creating laws.

That isn’t to say they’ve not been busy. The rather minimalist list of required duties handed to state legislators by the constitution has not stopped them from introducing somewhere north of 500 bills and counting, for Heaven’s sake — say what you will about the General Assembly, no one can accuse them of being underachievers. No, it is more an issue that so many of those bills have the effect of sluicing legislative authority away from the erstwhile legislating body and into the hungry bowels of the multitude of state executive agencies, whose appetites for such authority seem insatiable.

It remains, I hope, safe to say that upon graduating high school, most students have at least been exposed superficially to the concept of “Separation of Powers” as it pertains to American governance (notwithstanding the erosion that the art and practice of education has suffered under the union-led public school system). You know, all that antiquarian jazz about three separate governing branches and all. The concept is rapidly becoming as abstractly archaic as the Ninth and 10th Amendments, blurred as the lines have become with the relatively modern advent of the administrative state.

This isn’t an invention of the current legislative class; the cultivars were sown long ago. But the practice has certainly been perfected over the last few years.

Take, for instance, HB19-1261. That one granted the Air Quality Control Commission within the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment a regulatory blank check to do whatsoever it desired under the aegis of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. It runs about 11 pages, but can be summarized as follows: “Section 1, Legislative Declaration: The legislature declares that greenhouse gasses are bad… Section 3, memo to AQCC: do something about it. Use your discretion. Just let us know when it’s done.”

And so, off went the AQCC, and now the fruits of that particular labor being pelted on us. For instance, the Employee Trip Reduction Plan (ETRP), which I’ve written about before on these pages, will force businesses with 100 employees or more to regularly submit to the state plans to micromanage how their employees get to and from work, and will never see the inside of a legislative committee room or be subject to a debate on the floor of either chamber, since it falls under the purview of the commission’s mandate – gift-wrapped and handed to it by the legislature in 2019 with HB 1261.

And how about SB 181, from the same year, which essentially handed the AQCC the authority to regulate the oil and gas industry in the state out of existence, and restructured the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to do the same thing? Once that bill was passed, the legislature washed its hands and let the two agencies carry out the execution.

One might hope that such regulatory hyperactivity would encourage the legislature to take pause, and perhaps reel back in some of the power flung at these agencies. On the contrary, it seems they are unsatisfied with the rate of acceleration. So, another bill has been introduced, SB 200, which is essentially HB1261 on performance enhancers, directing the AQCC to hurry up with their rule-making. Basically, it is a law to tell the agency it abdicated law-making authority to, to make laws faster.

This is a symptom of political impatience. The legislative system we have inherited has a quasi-Burkean deliberative element built into it. Deliberation, prudence, and restraint are, however, not conducive to the sort of impulsive change demanded by dogmatism. Unelected agencies untethered by democratic constraints are much better for that.

One of the grievances outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was that “(King George III) has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Not a justification for a renewed call to arms, of course, but we do seem to have come full circle in just two hundred years.