Put another way:

There's the shit that happens through the legislative process, and there's the shit that happens before the legislative process. One of the principle complaints of civil libertarians is that citizens have effectively zero recourse through the latter, which is one reason lobbyists etc. work on it the hardest. The unfairness is related to the fact that the results of each process are similar, where one has input through government while the other does not.

We are currently in a peculiar position where our executive branch appears to care not a whit for the standards and practices of the rest of the United States, let alone its desires. As a consequence, expect far more back-room stuff.

Let's step back for a moment and consider the fact that the country is de facto in the hands of a man who gets up at 6am to watch TMZ and whose executive actions take the form of shouting at an assistant to blast something out on Twitter via an unsecured android phone. An end-run around that last sentence becomes an expedient and logical maneuver.