“Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan

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Then, there was the White House’s new Executive Order on Wednesday concerning, of all things,

“Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.”

While that may sound like an Onion headline, the Order included the following clause:

“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”

Innocuous language to the casual reader, but it set off alarm bells for people who practice administrative law. When an executive branch agency promulgates a new regulation, a law called the Administrative Procedure Act requires that it go through a notice and comment process, which allows the public and experts to express opinions about the rules before they can go into effect.

The Administration now maintains that as long as the president is “ordering” something, those rules no longer apply. You don’t have to have much of an imagination to see where that could end.

The Democracy Index