Your elected legislators are repeatedly bowing to Obama's insistence that everything is an emergency and something must be done right now. They are voting on bills willy-nilly without even attempting to figure out what is in it because "we have to make judgments very fast." No reason to do things right when you can do things fast.
I have long complained about systemic ignorance of the law at every level of our government. From politicians who don't have any idea of what goes into the legislation they pass to police who have to have cheat-sheets to know what the laws they are expected to enforce are. The average Joe? Well, if you break a law you don't know about then you get to hear the tired line: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Shouldn't that go both ways?