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Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

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Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#251

Post by saint_fiasco »

throw0101c wrote: post #227
lolinder wrote: post #115

There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the china shop breaking precedent at random or specifically to hurt specific groups of people. I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this…

> They believe that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets them. They believe that the Executive branch and the Judicial branch have been compensating for Congressional failure for too long and they have been very clear that they're intent on undoing that and rolling the system back to how they believe it should be. If Congress wants to delegate authority for m…

Congress can still delegate the known unknowns. They can say "because we are not experts in this subject, we delegate to agency X the power to decide whether this should be done in X or Y way"

What they cannot do anymore is delegate unknown unknowns. They cannot leave X and Y unspecified, the executive agencies cannot do things in Z way that Congress didn't enumerate, or α and β way that Congress didn't even conceive.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#252

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #196
callroomlamp wrote: post #118

Devastating that expertise will no longer influence the application of law and policy. The biggest question is who will interpret the application of law? Will it be challenged in court once again until a clear statement is made? Meanwhile, what will be the effects of this “deregulation” until a clear statement is made

Untrue. The way it will work now is that judges will focus on their expertise—interpreting what the laws mean. And agency experts will focus on their expertise—applying that law to specific factual scenarios.

> judges will focus on their expertise—interpreting what the laws mean. And agency experts will focus on their expertise—applying that law to specific factual scenarios.

It's not always that simple: Sometimes, trying to interpret "the law" in the abstract, without deep knowledge of the factual context, is like being a bull in a china shop.

The conservative justices' various obsessions with textualism, originalism, and whatever other flavor of the month comes up, are often unrealistic. Ditching Chevron deference, in the teeth of decades of precedent and congressional approval, is one of those situations.

Granted, your 3d Cir. clerking experience, seeing that aspect of how the sausage is made, does give your view a certain weight. But too many judges need to start remembering that they're hired help, bureaucrats, and when Congress says "we want the agencies we create to figure out what to do, subject to political checks," it's manifestly not on federal judges to say "oh no, you can only do that in a way that lets us judges have the dominant seat at the table."

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#253

Post by relaxing »

megaman821 wrote: post #205
dctoedt wrote: post #98

Time for Congress to start aggressively using its express constitutional power (under the Exceptions and Regulations Clause of Article III) to circumscribe federal courts' power to set aside congressional directives such as the ones that led to Chevron deference. "Separation of powers" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution; it's a bootstrapped creature of power-seeking judges.

If Congress had their shit together enough to reign in the federal courts, there wouldn't be so many federal laws that were ambiguous in the first place. Not sure what the shockwaves of this Chevron decision will be, but I am a fan of forcing the legislative branch to legislate again.

This will do nothing to force them to legislate.

Zero regulation is what they want.

Removal of regulation while they sit back and reap the cash rewards is precisely the designed outcome.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#254

Post by mp05 »

taylodl wrote: post #233
mp05 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this will cause us to start electing experts instead of lifelong politicians? The number of doctors, engineers, and scientists in Congress is pathetic.

Devil's advocate: isn't a lifelong politician an expert in politics? Isn't it the case that with so many noobs in Congress nothing is getting done because they simply don't know how to politic to get things done? All they know how to do is run to the nearest TV camera and start slandering everybody they don't like. Then they wonder why they can't broker deals to get what they want. Besides, very few doctors, engineer…

I think one could make an argument that the US system of governance was designed to encourage "politicking" by populist types in the House. Love him or hate him, LBJ was excellent at this sort of thing and an ideal representative. But I've read a lot of Caro and it seems he feels the US Senate has jumped the shark in this regard. The narrative laments the glory days of high-minded debate and the occasional cane beatings, but it's hard to say if that's Caro's actual view.

But it's fair to argue the Senate wasn't built for politicking, yet that's what it's devolved into. I'm a political layman, but perhaps popular vote of senators is a terrible idea as it discourages people unwilling to play hardball to get involved... these engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. It takes a special kind of thick skin to be in national office and those type of people don't seem to gravitate to science-based fields, but rather law and professional politics.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#255

Post by HelloMcFly »

tivert wrote: post #159
HelloMcFly wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously. If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling.

> If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling. But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment. To give an extreme though-experiment example: Lets say Congress 1) packed the Supreme Court with yes-men, 2) passed law giving themselves a huge pay raise…

> But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment.

A constitutional amendment make it permanent, but Congress never actually lost control. They always had the power - and still do - amend, restrain, clarify their own laws.

> Didn't it just create a a king/dictator? Wouldn't that be unconstitutional?

In a scenario with a packed Supreme Court of "yes men" there are no bounds to what could happen, so why bother with the thought experiment? In your example, the constitution is already worthless.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#256

Post by lovethevoid »

stronglikedan wrote: post #137
callroomlamp wrote: post #118

Devastating that expertise will no longer influence the application of law and policy. The biggest question is who will interpret the application of law? Will it be challenged in court once again until a clear statement is made? Meanwhile, what will be the effects of this “deregulation” until a clear statement is made

It's not about the application of law. It's about the ambiguity of law. If anything, they'll need to rely on more expertise now, so they can craft laws that aren't open to interpretation. This is a fantastic decision on the part of the court.

This doesn’t prevent writing laws open to interpretation at all.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#257

Post by lovethevoid »

rayiner wrote: post #196
callroomlamp wrote: post #118

Devastating that expertise will no longer influence the application of law and policy. The biggest question is who will interpret the application of law? Will it be challenged in court once again until a clear statement is made? Meanwhile, what will be the effects of this “deregulation” until a clear statement is made

Untrue. The way it will work now is that judges will focus on their expertise—interpreting what the laws mean. And agency experts will focus on their expertise—applying that law to specific factual scenarios.

Actually without C Deference, agency experts can no longer apply that law to specific factual scenarios.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#258

Post by salawat »

throw0101c wrote: post #227
lolinder wrote: post #115

There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the china shop breaking precedent at random or specifically to hurt specific groups of people. I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this…

> They believe that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets them. They believe that the Executive branch and the Judicial branch have been compensating for Congressional failure for too long and they have been very clear that they're intent on undoing that and rolling the system back to how they believe it should be. If Congress wants to delegate authority for m…

>If Congress wants to delegate authority for micro-managing things to agencies, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?

Because the Constitution defined the Legislative branch as the entry point for new laws. Not the Executive. Period. The Legislative branch, with the Power of the Purse, is more than capable of establishing the requisite in-house research apparata to allow the Branch to become quickly read up and fluent on anything. That was the purpose of the Library of Congress, and the Office of Technology Assessment. OTA, in particular, was dismantled by Congress because "why should we have this when all the lobbyists are so well informed anyway". I.e. an act of a group of politicians that should damn well know better than to blindly believe everything they are told/ignore everything they are specifically not told by special interests without corroborating reality first through the exercise of legislative subpoenas.

Congress put it's eyes out in a desperate bid to make it that much easier to be held unaccountable for doing their jobs, necessitating delegation to the Executive, which was far easier to manage dealing with.

>The Executive agencies and departments are created by Congress. US regulatory agencies have authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).

Yep. Those Agencies, however, should not be making corpuses of law (Administrative law; but I'll be charitable for argument sake, and grant that Administrative law is a necessary evil).

Notwithstanding the above, the Judiciary damn well shouldn't be ignoring grievance redressing relevant to any Administrative law. The Executive cannot be allowed to be all rolled up in one lawmaker, enforcer, and interpreter of last resort. It completely undermines the principle of seperation of powers.

Does that make life harder? Hell yes. Governing ain't supposed to be easy. It's high demand, high overhead, and wide blast radius at the Federal level. The fact the Legislature has gotten so bad at legislating should be a point of shame on us all.

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#259

Post by dctoedt »

doctoboggan wrote: post #240
lolinder wrote: post #115

There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the china shop breaking precedent at random or specifically to hurt specific groups of people. I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this…

I understand that one reason for the continuing of Chevron deference is that Congress has been writing laws for the past 4 decades assuming that the agencies can iron out the ambiguities. I wonder if going forward congress can just try to have those agencies iron out the ambiguities before passing the law? Or is the idea that its impossible to anticipate all possible edge cases and congress wants to let the agency ir…

> Or is the idea that its impossible to anticipate all possible edge cases and congress wants to let the agency iron out future issue?

This Plus, it's often a case of Congress kicking the can down the road: Enough votes in Congress might agree that something needs to be done, but they can't come up with agreement on the details — often because of conflicting special-interest (read: donor) lobbying about those details. So the legislators say, in effect, "OK, let's get 'a bill' passed [a minimum viable product, if you will] and let the agencies deal with it. Then later, if a major problem comes up with a particular agency ruling, we can revisit the issue then."

Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

#260

Post by lovethevoid »

mp05 wrote: post #167
callroomlamp wrote: post #118

Devastating that expertise will no longer influence the application of law and policy. The biggest question is who will interpret the application of law? Will it be challenged in court once again until a clear statement is made? Meanwhile, what will be the effects of this “deregulation” until a clear statement is made

Perhaps this will cause us to start electing experts instead of lifelong politicians? The number of doctors, engineers, and scientists in Congress is pathetic.

That’ll happen about the same time the Supreme Court stops being used as a political party battleground. So… never.
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