I don’t agree with that mental model because it assumes Congress has to make sure the job gets done. They don’t. They can be as dysfunctional as they want.
Polls show that the vast majority of people are unhappy with Congress, and yet they get re-elected at very high rates. There’s no real reason to suspect that their job performance had anything to do with getting elected anymore.
They could very easily just fail to regulate everything that actually needs it. The alternative to the FTC isn’t Congress doing the regulation, it’s no regulation at all.
Perhaps I’m overly pessimistic but I think we’ve gotten to a point where gerrymandering has just broken Congress irreparably by divorcing their job security from their effectiveness. I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
