You are correct and I mostly agree with your assumptions.
I don’t think returning to a long ago conception of a document we poorly understood 200 years ago is the solution. I do think that unless we have clarity, we will not be able to solve our problems. The biggest issue we have in figuring out what is happening is that Congress and the President (both parties over many years) have conspired to make things unclear. For so many years it was impossible for Republicans to win congress. Labor Democrats and Southern Democrats were too many Democrats.
From a partisan stand point, the Republican solution to this dilemma was to agree with the Democrats that the Presidential branch should have more responsibility. Republicans then had a chance to make laws. Republican Presidents stood up and said “Elect me and I will . . . . and ensure it is done in a more responsible manner.” Democrats liked this idea because then they could pass more and more of their Socialist agenda.
From a purely human standpoint, politicians from both parties agreed because they could blur the lines of responsibility. Republicans could blame Obama, Clinton, Carter, LBJ, etc. and Democrats could blame Bush, Bush, Reagan, Nixon etc. Presidents went along with this too because they were term limited anyway AND they got more policy making ability.
Win, win all around.
Now regarding the Clean Air Act, I have to disagree. Our experts are in no way as capable of making judgments any better than our congressmen. All the good things you you mention would have been perfectly capable of being done after experts proposed them and congress confirmed them. (BTW - I am an expert in that area.)
The central question comes down to, “Who do you trust, the experts or the American people?” Or, as Madison said,
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
We have not found angels to govern men and never will.
We may, for the first time in decades, be approaching the point at which one party, the Democrats, will yield its dominance and recede to long term minority status. This is because the modern welfare state and its share the wealth ethic is nearing the financial breaking point and must be rolled back. The public now seems to recognize that this must be done and that, because the Democratic Party is ideologically incapable of such a task, power must be handed to conservative Republicans.
As for the Clean Air Act and other regulatory schemes that require extensive rule making by administrative agencies, the pattern of legislative delegation that we see at the federal level is duplicated at the state level as a matter of necessity. As bad as administrative agencies are when they make rules -- and I have worked in several and also been involved in legislative issues -- the making of legislation tends to be a more chaotic and seamier process.
Does that mean that I prefer government by administrative rules instead of by legislation? Not at all. It just means that I see administrative decisions and rule making as necessary and ultimately subject to check by legislatures and the public.
I too speak from some experience -- and can put names on some of the stinkers in government. At the request of a horrified friend in a state agency, I once got a legislative committee chairman I knew to write a few words into a bill that protected the use of emergency medical oxygen by non-EMTs. Otherwise, my friend's agency would have used its rule making power to ban emergency medical oxygen by anyone other than EMTs.
On another occasion, I found an ethics violation by a senior state Senator. My brother and I then filed an ultimately successful ethics complaint that ended his political career. This was but one facet of a long fight that we (and others) waged against an ill-conceived major toll road project. The fight impacted local and state politics for years because we refused to give up until we won.
My take away lessons from those and other experiences was the importance of persistence, of having no illusions, of knowing and working the system, and that checks and balances work -- but only if you fight hard and make them work.