Public Commentary on Regulation

The post below highlights what I think is a recurring problem with public commentary (whether in newspapers or on blogs) on federal regulation. All too often, people 1) assume that the regulatory agency is acting at the sole direction of the President (which is much less often true than one might think); 2) assume the worst possible motives for the agency's action; 3) utterly ignore the possibility that the agency might be acting in order to implement a) laws passed by Congress or b) court decisions. (For other examples, see my posts on the media consolidation debate here and here, where critics seemed to be completely unaware that the FCC had to loosen its rules because courts kept holding that the FCC's old rules failed to follow Congress's direction.)