The Despotism of the Clerks

The Congress wants to make "price gouging" a federal felony. Worse, they want to leave it up to clerks to define price gouging.

This bill would criminalize "price gouging" by gasoline wholesalers and retailers, with fines of $150 Million per offense for wholesalers and $3 million for retailers, and years of jail time for both. But it doesn't even pretend to define the elements of the crime, delegating this to the FTC, which will define what "price gouging" might be. Would that be raising your price because your supplier raised his? Or because you'd lost your shirt on the last shipment? Or because your other running costs have gone up? Or because you anticipate them going up? By how much and for how long would your prices have to be raised to expose you to jail time? What if you raise less than the guy across the street? Two blocks down the street? Across town? What if you just don't lower your price when others do? These are just quick questions from a country lawyer with no experience in energy policy or law, nor in gasoline supply. But I thought Congress wrote the laws and the executive branch enforced them: with at most the power to create regulations to implement the Congressional purpose as disclosed in the law. I also thought that the duty to write a law, and clearly, was particularly strong when the statute might take away liberty as well as merely a stunning sum of money. What am I missing here? This looks to me like pure political grandstanding and a lawless grant of the lawmaking power.