So basically now the agencies won't need to think about interpreting the law themselves?
Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#312Devastating 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
What does “expertise” have to do with whether Congress authorized fishermen to be charged for government-mandated inspectors?
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#313This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this? Or can justices just keep granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints?
It's worth reading the judgement itself. The court has indeed voted to give the courts more power, but not on the basis of nothing. It did so because it views it as taking back powers that were incorrectly/lazily given up without basis in what Congress wanted. From the judgement:
Congress in 1946 enacted the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] “as a check upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt, 338 U. S., at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#314This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this? Or can justices just keep granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints?
If you ignore the labels here, it's a small group of lawyers giving themselves more power because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws. So the large body isn't functioning well and the small body doesn't trust it anymore. So if we make the small body (the supreme court) large like the large body (congress) will that actually fix the issue? Isn't the i…
Congress may be inefficient (by design, basically) but they have one advantage: they're elected. Everyone fantasizes about government by an unelected group of experts, until they wake up one day and find out those unelected experts don't share their values at all -- and there's nothing they can do about it.
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that isn’t the case. It is saying that regulatory agencies cannot exceed their authority and act like the judicial branch. In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously.
> It is saying that regulatory agencies cannot exceed their authority and act like the judicial branch. On any given matter there are, at first, no laws on a given subject. Before airplanes were invented there were no rules or regulations for airplanes (FAA); similarly, pre-radio, nothing about how to use EM fields (FCC). Now, The (US) People gave The Congress authority to make laws on any subject (limited only by th…
> So Congress delegated further rule making
Couldnt they just do this formally? Afaict scotus didnt rule it's unconstitutional for congress to explicitly defer, but the derefence, which originated in court precedent, isn't good.
Theres nothing stoping congress from explictly defering either via act or in the act. Right?
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#316This is unbelievably good news! It's time to move power out of the hands of bureaucrats back into Congress where it belongs.
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Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#317I'm impressed that they can so easily dispose of 40 years of law making by Congress that assumed that agencies would interpret the statutes and make rules for regulating their area of authority. Now Congress is going to have to specify every possible consequence of laws in the statutes, otherwise a judge will decide. So agencies will not have any power to actually regulate. Awesome logic work, but terrible legal thin…
Congress can still delegate chevron style. They just have to explicitly do so
There's already been a big issue with 'regulatory capture' and lobbying in government.
Congress is only going to delegate when some other entity, likely a business, isn't already writing the law/regulation.
A concrete example: Boeing is going to up their lobbying game hard. They can now not only help write the laws, but help choose who says they've broken them. There is no way that it will be good for passengers before it is good for stockholders.
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#318This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this? Or can justices just keep granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints?
Chevron has only been around since 1984. What was done previously?
The judgement discusses that. Previously in cases where a statute was ambiguous the courts interpreted it. Chevron changed that to allow the executive to interpret ambiguous laws, but the judgement argues that interpretation of the law is and always has been the role of the courts.
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#319I am really not a fan of the current Supreme Court, but this looks to be a good ruling. Agencies get carried away by their power, and this power requires stronger checks by real courts, not by the fake agency courts that always rule in favor of the agency. I make no judgment on how this ruling will be used or abused.
To continue, although people will complain about the risk of environmental harm from this ruling, this harm is more a function of easy loans to companies that emit pollution. If you were change the money supply back to being gold-backed, the easy loans go away, the "growth at all costs" mantra dials back, and the ongoing environmental harm thereby modulates itself. It is the root cause of the unsustainable growth and environmental evils we see.
Re: Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine
#320This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this? Or can justices just keep granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints?
If you ignore the labels here, it's a small group of lawyers giving themselves more power because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws. So the large body isn't functioning well and the small body doesn't trust it anymore. So if we make the small body (the supreme court) large like the large body (congress) will that actually fix the issue? Isn't the i…
> because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws
How do you figure? This ruling says that Congress must be domain experts in every area, and agencies must merely implement the specific policies that Congress dictates.
Is that even possible? For anyone? Sure, Congress is dysfunctional but so what? This new regime is unworkable, and it doesn't matter if it's dysfunctional politicians or "top lawyers".