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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

#971

Post by hedora »

VincentEvans wrote: post #664

Congress can actually legislate the right of agencies to interpret the gaps in the laws back into effect - by passing a law that explicitly gives agencies this power. Just like congress can legislate abortion laws rather than leaving it to judicial precedence. Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with the position of supreme court to push the responsibility of lawmaking back on congress.

How can congress do this if the Supreme Court is going to repeatedly make retroactive changes to what the laws that congress passes mean?

For 40 years, legislation was drafted under the assumption Chevron deference was going to be used to interpret the text of the bills. Now, all of those laws mean something other than what the authors intended.

If this was software, it'd be the equivalent of changing post-K&R C language semantics in a backwards incompatible way, and just saying "Well, if programmers care that industrial control systems are literally burning factories to the ground, they can just fix all the software that was written since 1984. Also, moving forward, we reserve the right to keep making intentionally-breaking changes to the compiler, so during the rewrite, they should take future planned-but-currently-secret semantic changes into account."

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

#973

Post by Gormo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #827
Gormo wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with yesterday’s ruling on administrative courts, this amounts to a massive increase in the role of the federal judiciary in the execution of government action. Sounds great. How we got to the point where executive-branch agencies were making rules with the force of law, binding upon the public with no judicial oversight, is a mystery to me, but it's good to see that the courts are taking their responsibil…

a mystery to me It's ably explained in Roberts' opinion. In short, Congress often left the fine details to the agencies, not least because the laws were often drafted within those same agencies. Chevron was based on the idea that if statutory text is ambiguous the people in charge of implementing said statute were best positioned to figure out what it meant, in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act (which…

> Chevron was based on the idea that if statutory text is ambiguous the people in charge of implementing said statute were best positioned to figure out what it meant

Yes, that's an accurate assessment of what Chevron doctrine entails. And again, it is a mystery to me how anyone could ever have thought that this was a good idea, or was in any way consistent with the constitutional separation of powers.

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

#974

Post by Gormo »

ytpete wrote: post #795
Gormo wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with yesterday’s ruling on administrative courts, this amounts to a massive increase in the role of the federal judiciary in the execution of government action. Sounds great. How we got to the point where executive-branch agencies were making rules with the force of law, binding upon the public with no judicial oversight, is a mystery to me, but it's good to see that the courts are taking their responsibil…

There's been plenty of judicial oversight – courts could always overturn any regulations or actions by an agency that the court decided were not based on a "reasonable" interpretation of the law passed by Congress.

Well, no, they couldn't, that's the whole point of this. Under Chevron doctrine, the courts were deferring to the agency's own interpretation of the law they were testing that agency's actions against, and not applying their own "reasonable" interpretation of the law at all. Reversing Chevron restores the court's responsibility to engage in that interpretation on their own part.

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

#975

Post by Gormo »

freejazz wrote: post #832
Gormo wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with yesterday’s ruling on administrative courts, this amounts to a massive increase in the role of the federal judiciary in the execution of government action. Sounds great. How we got to the point where executive-branch agencies were making rules with the force of law, binding upon the public with no judicial oversight, is a mystery to me, but it's good to see that the courts are taking their responsibil…

> binding upon the public with no judicial oversight What on earth are you talking about?

I'm not sure what was ambiguous about my initial phrasing, but to elaborate for the sake of clarity, I'm talking about the reversal of Chevron doctrine (i.e. the topic of this thread) -- under this doctrine, the federal courts had delegated interpretation of the statutes under which administrative agencies operate to those agencies themselves.

This created a state of affairs in which agencies were indeed making rules that were binding upon the public, and doing so without the courts exercising oversight on their own part to determine whether those rules were consistent with the prevailing statute law.

Now that Chevron doctrine has been reversed, when agencies engage in novel rulemaking that expands the scope of their authority, it will be up to the courts, not the agency itself, to decide whether that expansion of authority is consistent with current prevailing law.

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

#976

Post by Gormo »

idkwhatimdoin wrote: post #811
Gormo wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now businesses must factor in the uncertainty of any random person launching a lawsuit that causes a local court to reverse a federal agency policy. Huge potential impacts to product / revenue, not just legal fees to fight everything Businesses already have to deal with frequent litigation, including class-action lawsuits even in areas that overlap with regulatory agencies. Quite to the contrary of what you are sug…

Except this and other rulings mean there's no such thing as "solid precedent" anymore.

No, again, you've got it exactly backwards. "Solid precedent" can now be established via the development of jurisprudence under stare decisis, as is the judiciary's role.

Under Chevron, agencies themselves were interpreting and re-interpreting statute law as they saw fit, and there was no binding precedent at all.

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

#978

Post by Gormo »

bumby wrote: post #506
mike_hearn wrote: post #313

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…

This feels like one of those topics that may sound ok in theory, but breaks down in practice. The implication is that the judges must be well-versed enough in any domain brought before them to interpret the laws effectively. This seems like a tall order for nine people. We have already seen this trouble in expecting strict interpretations regarding tech. To be fair, Congress has the same problem. I believe that was i…

> This feels like one of those topics that may sound ok in theory, but breaks down in practice. The implication is that the judges must be well-versed enough in any domain brought before them to interpret the laws effectively

No -- subject matter expertise is not relevant per se, as what is being evaluated in these cases is not whether the policy advanced by a given agency is sound on its technical merits or factual basis, but whether it is within the bounds of the authority granted to that agency by the applicable statutes.

The courts aren't concerned with "crafting effective regulations", they are concerned with ensuring that the people who are tasked with doing so are operating consistently with prevailing statute law and the constitution.

And, considering that the judiciary is staffed with the world's foremost experts in statutory interpretation and constitutional law, this arrangement makes sure that all of the disparate facets of the process are being undertaken by the most qualified people available.

It's not appropriate to make officials who are hired on the basis of their knowledge of medicine, RF transmission, economics, etc. to bear the entire burden of determining the complex legalities of their authority. They have to step far outside their field of expertise and engage in textual analysis of statutory law or delve deep into constitutional theory to determine whether their rule-making process is indeed legally permissible. It's better to let the courts do their job here and tell them when they are out of line, so they can focus on doing their own jobs properly.

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

#979

Post by mjrpes »

chasd00 wrote: post #436
vundercind wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As explained in the dissent, they literally have to delegate the kind of authority in question here. It’s the hostile-genie problem: you can’t close all the loopholes in some iron-clad unambiguous way in finite space.

those loopholes and ambiguities should be left to the courts to decide with representation from both sides of the argument making their case and not some department head full of political bias and possibly an axe to grind favoring one side.

Deferring to agencies was not absolute. Courts could overrule if agencies were not being reasonable in their interpretation.

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

#980

Post by anticensor »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #948
VincentEvans wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid point! I’d like to hear more regarding this concern. While I don’t necessarily view what I referred to as “interpreting the gaps” as synonymous with “legislate”, IANAL and would appreciate professional opinion here.

IMO The rule of law derives from precedent. Prior to courts there was the rule of the monarch. The common law then developed as courts resolved disputes. It was all gap. The authorities would say the accused did something wrong and should be punished, and the courts came up with things like “murder” and “negligence.” Statutes are a relatively new way of making laws. They’re crude. Rather than simply resolving a real…

Precedents binding multiple courts is also relatively new (about 2.5 centuries). Before that, each court was effectively an island.
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