ILLEGAL BUREAUCRATIC RULES

From WAPO.  "Study: Hundreds of rules passed by Obama administration are technically illegal."  What is the difference between "technically illegal" and "illegal".  Could I use this phrasing to get out of a traffic ticket?

There’s a problem, however: Technically speaking, these and about 1,800 other regulations shouldn’t be in effect, because they weren’t reported to Congress as required. Yet there is little that lawmakers or the courts can do about it.

The situation illustrates the obscure, byzantine process used to create federal regulations — and how easily it can go awry.

“It’s pretty apparent that the system is broken,” said Curtis Copeland, a retired Congressional Research Service staffer who discovered the issue. “It would seem this is one area where congressional Republicans and Democrats could get together and say: ‘This is crazy. We can fix this.’ ”

Under a 1996 statute, most federal rules are supposed to be reported to the House and Senate in paper form and to the Government Accountability Office electronically. But since the start of 2012, that hasn’t happened for many of the regulations put out by the Obama administration, either because of bureaucratic oversight or because they were considered too minor to be reported.