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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

#371

Post by TylerE »

psunavy03 wrote: post #363
TylerE wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only checks involved were in the mail, and almost certainly addressed to Clarence Thomas, who has taken more in bribes than the last 30 other justices combined , and that’s only the ones he’s been caught on.

And yet there are eight other Justices, and nothing he has to say matters unless he can get four others to agree with him. If Thomas is known for anything on the Court, it's shouting into the void in concurrence or dissent.

Yeah, right. All the new conservative justices rammed through recently are cut from Thr exact same cloth.

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

#372

Post by jeffbee »

remarkEon wrote: post #207
consumer451 wrote: post #43

From Justice Kagan's dissent on page 82: > 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…

> 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... I really hope she meant to convey a different point here, because it reads as if congress doesn't care and wants unelected bureaucrats figuring out what laws mean because they t…

You missed the point of the paragraph. Congress routinely writes laws directing, for example, the EPA to determine if and when an emissions-reducing technology is economically feasible. The majority opinion is saying that courts need not defer to such findings and they will decide for themselves.

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

#373

Post by rsoto2 »

mywittyname wrote: post #11
epicureanideal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge and positive in the direction of lawmakers making law, not regulatory bodies that are unelected. Similarly in favor of trials by jury and not by regulatory administrative courts. A huge win for democracy and freedom that both major US parties and all citizens should celebrate.

So...bad. I'm the person who prefers having regulatory bodies handle matters over a dysfunctional and ignorant congress who is political about everything.

our "regulatory bodies" (everyone's fav new word) allowed US companies to poison the blood of every child in the world and those companies and people responsible faced little consequence.

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

#374

Post by mschuster91 »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #344
matthewdgreen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#375

Post by bombcar »

parhamn wrote: post #315
throw0101c wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Read the judgement, it's pretty simple.

All this says is that if Congress defers something to a branch, and there is ambiguity, and it comes in front of a judge, the judge does NOT have to accept the branch's interpretation of the ambiguity, and can instead judge it as judges do.

Chevron said that if the branch had a reasonable interpretation (e.g, not batshit insane like saying "no arsenic in water" means "at least ten pounds per gallon of arsenic in water") then the judge should defer to it. Now the judge can but does not have to defer to it - if he pushes back, Congress can clarify the law.

This has been done many times in the IRS, where people find a "loophole", the IRS tries to patch it themselves, the courts say, yeah, nah, and then Congress amends the law to remove it.

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

#376

Post by Spivak »

maxwell wrote: post #328
rootusrootus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this decision do that, or does it just move the accumulation of power to a different branch? From bureaucrats who can be fired to unelected judges with lifetime tenure. How would you argue that this is an improvement? The response may be that Congress makes far more specific legislation, along with all the weird pitfalls that will come from that, and outsources the actual text to corporate lobbyists. That seems…

It's not moving power from the executive to the judicial branch, it's forcing legislative responsibility back on Congress. Note that constituents in the U.S. have the worst representation of any OECD country. Worse than Commie China. America's biggest problem is the "Permanent" Apportionment Act of 1929.

> it's forcing legislative responsibility back on Congress

I mean it's not really going to do this in practice, because Congress can and will continue to be dysfunctional it just means that the court rather than the agency is going to make the call on what the law means. Without a way for the judiciary to be say, "this law is too ambiguous to rule on, Congress must pass a law right now clarifying their intent, then we will issue a ruling" it's just going to be the judges making a call.

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

#377

Post by debacle »

Spivak wrote: post #368
debacle wrote: post #354

Good. Make Congress do its job. Erode the executive until we're not frothing at the mouth every 4 years worrying about who will be "in charge," and instead focusing on the actions of our congressional representatives.

So we froth at the mouth every two years instead? I get the argument but I'm not really sure this is going to help in the way you want it.

Absolutely. I have 400 times more control over who my congressman is than who the president is.

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

#379

Post by ABCLAW »

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.

>If anything, they'll need to rely on more expertise now, so they can craft laws that aren't open to interpretation.

Every law is open to interpretation. If tech can barely secure the doors on machines that execute instructions near-flawlessly, you think we can construct flawless frameworks out of inherently ambiguous linguistic building blocks run and understood by deeply human executors? This just plain doesn't work when the rubber meets the road.

Someone's going to make a choice, and SCOTUS just decided unilaterally that it's going to be a body that hasn't been able to decide anything productively for a decade.

This isn't about creating better structures for the analysis of rules; it's about gutting the regulatory capacity of agencies.

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

#380

Post by blacksqr »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #284
bell-cot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obvious check #1: Congress gets its sh*t together, and stops writing endless vague blather into law. Obvious check #2: Congress enlarges the Supreme Count to 21 Justices. And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss.

> And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss. And who, in your view, is supposed to be the real boss? Congress? Or the President? The Supreme Court is supposed to be independent . Changing that needs a much higher threshold than "bell-cot doesn't like some recent Supreme Court decisions".

I have a fantasy solution that I know will never be implemented, but in my mind resolves all objections to expanding the court.

Promote all eleven judges in the DC circuit court of appeals to the Supreme Court and leave the appeals court empty. For each vacancy that occurs on the Supreme Court, the president gets to pick one judge for the appeals court, until the Supreme Court justice count is back to 9 and the appeals court judge count is back to 11; at which time things go back to status quo ante.

This would allow the Supreme Court to be rebalanced without the president packing the court with partisan choices. Rather, it respects the record of judicial confirmations for the appeals court going back almost 40 years and several presidential administrations.

It would increase the number of perspectives on the court and make the Justices work harder to find consensus, rather than the majority being able to lazily fall back on pet legal theories that are out of the mainstream.

It would counter and largely nullify the Republican strategy of targeting the Supreme Court with nomination of extremist and underqualified candidates with significant questions about their backgrounds, and confirming the nominees with dubious political maneuvering.

It would be hard for Republicans to escalate; i.e., if a Democratic president added 12 slots to the Supreme court, what's to stop a Republican president and congress adding 20 more at first opportunity, and so on. Republicans could choose to elevate another court's judges to the Supreme Court, but that would tend to further balance the Court and make decisions more unpredictable, rather than produce a clear partisan advantage.

It would take the Supreme Court nomination issue out of presidential politics for a generation.

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