The pencil example is all fun and games, but swap « buying mechanical pencils » with « sending people to prison », and then it makes more sense why some people prefer the judiciary branch to constrain the power of HR when there’s ambiguity.
I'd also prefer a more practical example to argue with.
IMHO my shift on this is due to the practical examples seen over the years, legislature delegating to an agency they create, with judicial review, ends up being a good thing.
I'm honestly unaware of any unjust rule-making that ended up unfairly trampling someone, much less whip-lash back and forth.
What would be unreasonable is to give those 3 options to a judge and ask them to do a coin toss on which one is right, and then let it sit that way.
I may be radical in this, but I wish the judiciary could force the legislative branch to decide on what the law they wrote means.
Anything passed by the legislative that tries to end run that delegation is simply not even a law. The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land. What is explicit within it overrides everything else.
The American system has always been full-throated adversarial -- and extremely successful. The historical system of legislature could delegate, and if the delegation went bad, the judiciary could intervene, rather than the legislature has to intervene in every bit of administrative minutae.
Analogy would roughly be...idk, the CEO has HR handle pencil procurement. HR, over the years, used this to interpret they could swap in mechanical pencils, erasable pens. But the new CFO tells the board this has to stop, the CEO is responsible for signing off on expenses. And then the employees say this is a good thing, that'll get the CEO more involved. But the CEO is already involved, just busy with other things.