charles de montesquieu wrote that the power to legislate is the power to make laws, not the power to make legislators. he recognized, i think, that there was a natural temptation among elected lawmakers to want to pass the buck along to someone else, to want to give to someone else the task of making law. and we do this sometimes when we pass an extraordinarily broad law and then we direct some executive branch agency to simply fill in the gaps, to effectively make the laws. the affordable care act is replete with instances in which this kind of thing occurs, in which certain broad parameters are spelled out and in which we then say to this department or that department that it will have the power to promulgate rules carrying the force of generally applicable law which that same department or that same agency will then have the power to enforce. so that's part of how we end up with 20,000 pages of implementing regulations already under obamacare. 20,000 pages and counting. because we've got a lot of instances in which we've delegated de facto law-making power. that, too, presents it'

that's why montesquieu wrote that you have to separate these powers, so that no one body of people, no one grouping within government would assume or absorb too much power. that's what's happening here. by giving up our power for petty partisan reasons. let's be really frank with each other. the senate democrats have for petty partisan reasons taken away the power of congress, taken away one of the checks and balances on a rogue presidency. these checks and balances are not something that really should be -- we should stoop to the level of petty partisanship over. by allowing us to do so, what has happened is we have allowed ourselves to give up one of the great checks and balances that were one of the beauties of our constitution. the loss of the filibuster i think truly weakens congress, and it makes the executive, regardless of party, more powerful and less likely to be transparent and really less likely to compromise. in short, when you give power to the party in the minority, when you have that power in the party that is in the minority, it works to coax compromise out of people.