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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

#411
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would trust the nations top lawyers more than most of the congress members we have If you're referring to the justices, who are approved by those Congress members you don't trust, it is a dramatic stretch to assume they are the nation's best lawyers.

There’s no requirement for them to be a lawyer at all, or have any legal training.

Also congress is full of lawyers.

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

#412

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

What does “expertise” have to do with whether Congress authorized fishermen to be charged for government-mandated inspectors?

The court made their decision at a very high level of abstraction, rather than limiting it to fishermen.

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

#413

I 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…

Also its funny because the original Chevron case was about how under Reagan the EPA re-interpreted the Clean Air Act to make it easier for companies to introduce new pollution sources. The EPA was sued and the lower courts backed the original interpretation of the Clean Air Act. This was overturned by the Supreme Court in the Chevron decision which said the courts must defer to the EPA's new interpretation.

So the environmental impacts of this decision are hardly clear cut.

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

#414

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…

The Roberts Court just decided to increase Congress' workload 100000x. This is one of those rulings that is going to get overturned in a few decades when it turns out to be completely unworkable to have Congress be subject-matter experts in thousands of areas.

In 10 years when people wonder why their rivers are glowing green and everything in the ground is dying and there's a weird smell in the air, and corporations are just allowed to decide you pay them for no services and there's nothing you can do about it...this decision is going to be the reason.

It looks like Thomas' and Alito's benefactors finally got what they spent most of the last decade trying to buy.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems crazy that Congress does not have the authority to delegate implementation details to experts. I just don't see anything in the Constitution that forbids that.

Are there provisions in the Constitution for one Branch to delegate its powers to another?

There’s no rule against it, and it’s what Congress has done, so it’s what’s happening.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

As a legal dilettante I have some questions: What does this decision mean for court caseload going forward? If it will increase, how much? Is there budget for that?

It doesn't mean anything for court caseload.

There seem to be a lot of posts in this thread that are misinterpreting what the judgement means. Here's what I understood from reading it:

• This case does not affect Congress' ability to delegate defined lawmaking powers to the executive. Congress can continue to delegate whatever they want.

• It will therefore not have any impact on the speed with which the US government can pass laws.

• It does not award the courts any new powers.

• What it does is go back to the pre-1984 system in which the meaning of ambiguous rules were decided by the courts.

• It does so on the basis of a specific law called the APA, in which Congress spelled out that the courts should defer to agencies on matters of fact, but does not say courts should defer to agencies on how to interpret ambiguous law. Also that law was passed specifically to limit the powers of the executive. So, their ruling seems founded in the will of Congress.

Because ambiguous rules would have to be decided on anyway, and they were already being decided in the context of a court case, this won't affect the number of cases being decided.

I think the only way to attack this ruling would be to show that there was some law that superceded or replaced the APA, or that the relevant section of the APA itself was unconstitutional. But why would it be? As the court points out, the fact that ambiguous law is interpreted by the courts is a very old and unremarkable arrangement. The Chevron decision was the radical deviation from normal practice, reversing it just puts things back to how most people already think it works.

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems crazy that Congress does not have the authority to delegate implementation details to experts. I just don't see anything in the Constitution that forbids that.

Are there provisions in the Constitution for one Branch to delegate its powers to another?

Do you understand the implication of the answer to that question being "No, and it cannot delegate those powers"?

Congress would have to vote on giving approval for each new drug, not the FDA's bureaucrats.

Congress would have to vote on each individual edge case for welfare programs (SNAP, Social Security, Medicaid, etc), not their respective agencies.

Congress would have to vote on which individual people get Pell grants, how much, and how much their parents are expected to contribute to their university schooling, not the Department of Education.

Congress would have to vote to approve contracts for every federal agency.

The federal government would not function without some degree of delegation.

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

#418

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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Appointing people based on party loyalty is always cited as one of the major reason the Soviet Union became a slow-motion train wreck. It's not something America should emulate.

Not to mention that packing the courts could well be interpreted as an open attack against the separation of powers

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

#419

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…

On the flip side-- congress often will pass regulation with the very intent to allow ambiguity so that the regulatory agency will have extreme latitude often against the will of the people. Or a regulatory agency will grossly stretch their mandate to overstep what they are effectively allowed to regulate and interpret. Since there effectively minimal judicial checks and balances against that behavior that's also not…

To anyone wondering, to save you some googling: yes, both the mentioned instances aren’t obviously-unreasonable in context. One was someone formally asking the ATF whether it’d be illegal if they made a machine gun with a shoe string, and would that shoe string then be an illegal machine gun part and the ATF going “yeah, duh” and the other was someone seeing exactly how close they could get to selling machine gun conversion parts without crossing the line, and the karmic principle of FAFO kicked in.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is taking power away from regulator bodies like EPA that enforce the laws and giving it to the courts... taking the enforcement out of the hands of the experts.

How is it "taking the enforcement out of the hands of the experts?" Judges are supposed to be experts on law. That's literally their job. If the parties before them feel that they need expert knowledge to render the right ruling, then they need to take those experts and either depose them or have them testify. Expert witnesses are a thing; this is not some new idea.

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