Interest groups neutralize regulation by watering down its operational rules

Evidence

If a bill is passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, opposing special-interest groups shift the battle to the defanging phase in an effort to weaken and circumvent the law. The defanging strategy takes a variety of forms. Laws are mainly general statements of intent. The task of converting enacted laws to operational rules is delegated to regulatory agencies, which spell out the legal specifics. Lobbyists can use their influence to water down a proposed law until its intent is subverted. If that happens, the legislative initiative can end up toothless. Targeted industries also enlist their resources and talent to find loopholes in a law to turn intended regulations into unintended profits. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1526

Categorization

• XREF: The defanging mechanism shows institutionalized diffusion of responsibility away from legislators to regulatory agencies—relevant to the reader’s institutional-rationalization theme. — connects to: Interest groups more often oppose than favor proposed policy changes. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 116; Regulatory agencies’ rule-making lets lobbyists gut enacted laws
• DEFINE: Defines ‘defanging’ as a distinct four-phase strategy (defeat, defang, deregulate, dismantle) for neutralizing legislation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1526