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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

#341

Post by dilippkumar »

There’s a lot of negativity around this ruling here on HN.

As a not-lawyer, non expert, I welcome this ruling. The strongest argument I can make in favor of this come from the dissenting opinion by Justice Kagan:

> This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent. Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes...

> It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court...

In other words, Congress can not get its shit together, but someone still has to do the work of figuring out what rules we should all follow. Congress would much rather play politics and make speeches and theatrical high-drama hearing rather than doing the hard work of legislating laws.

It is obvious that Congress can not get all the details right. Neither can the regulatory body. The only advantage of delegating the work of rule-making to regulators is that the iteration times are faster.

Why are the iteration times faster? It has more to do with the Congress being a dysfunctional body.

When incompetence is rewarded by reduced work loads, incompetence is amplified.

Yes Congress can not get their shit together. But that’s way more visible to voters when their incompetence translates to visible inaction.

This is the way the system should work (in my opinion). Feels like a positive ruling to me.

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

#342

Post by p_j_w »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #251
throw0101c wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>What they cannot do anymore is delegate unknown unknowns.

And that's absurd. Congress should have the ability to do this. If they don't like what an agency is doing, they're perfectly able to amend the law.

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

#343

Post by diffxx »

lolinder wrote: post #144
Spivak wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but people who have been listening have also been dreading this coming for years. The fact that they're consistently knocking over shelves doesn't make it better. We've known that Roe was on the chopping block, but it doesn't make it good law even if it's consistent with the conservative justices' goals.

Like I said, there are legitimate arguments to be made against this change, but a lot of people are quick to assume that the Court is out to get them. The cases that people would approve of if they heard about them get ignored by social media, instead focusing exclusively on the cases that undo some rights that had been established by judicial or executive precedent. So we end up in a place where a lot of commenters…

I do not understand how you can not see this is an activist court. They have by fiat invented new judicial principles out of thin air: "history and tradition" and "major questions doctrine" come to mind. And they apply these arbitrary principles in a heavy handed, inconsistent and simultaneously predictable way while sanctimoniously acting as though we can't see what they are doing.

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

#344

Post by ElevenLathe »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #314
Xeoncross wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#345

Post by aport »

bluGill wrote: post #330
aport wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would much rather unelected bureaucrat scientists decide how to implement the intent and application of laws than congress.

You hake no reason to assume that. The people who will try to write those regulations are those with have an angle. We call it regulatory capture.

I don't see how the threat of regulatory capture would argue against letting experts decide what actions need to be taken to protect the publics health and the environment

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

#346

Post by deltarholamda »

Balgair wrote: post #317
HDThoreaun wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bef…

This is done with the regulatory agencies now, i.e. the revolving door from government agency to private sector.

Worse, in some ways, because there's no real paper trail, such as donations to politicians or PACs.

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

#347

Post by singleshot_ »

brettcvz wrote: post #71

This 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?

We could solve all our problems via the ballot box in the legislature, and then these people would have more or less no cases to resolve.

That has unfortunately proven unworkable.

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

#348

Post by btilly »

Xeoncross wrote: post #307
brettcvz wrote: post #71

This 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…

You may trust the nation's top lawyers more than Congress. But in recent decades those lawyers have been picked for ideological purity in a process that distills what is bad about our political process. As a result I now trust Congress more than the Supreme Court. And not because I trust our broken Congress more than I used to!

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

#350

Post by ceejayoz »

bluGill wrote: post #330
aport wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would much rather unelected bureaucrat scientists decide how to implement the intent and application of laws than congress.

You hake no reason to assume that. The people who will try to write those regulations are those with have an angle. We call it regulatory capture.

Congress is similarly captured.
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