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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

#481

Post by Powdering7082 »

sattoshi wrote: post #434
immibis wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't force Congress to do shit. The same flip flop will still happen, but instead of 4-year executive terms, it will be driven by lifetime court appointments. The court is going to remain Republican for the foreseeable future, unlike the presidency.

Whats the problem? If congress disagrees with what the courts did to fill in the blanks in their laws, they just need to pass new laws.

Why even have an executive branch? Surely everything can just be done through our efficient judicial system and wise legislative system

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

#482

Post by EricDeb »

rayiner wrote: post #196
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

Untrue. The way it will work now is that judges will focus on their expertise—interpreting what the laws mean. And agency experts will focus on their expertise—applying that law to specific factual scenarios.

Well soon agency experts will focus on displaying their loyalty to Trump as their main job focus. But yes in theory what you're saying is true

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

#484

Post by dangoor »

lolinder wrote: post #444
immibis wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't force Congress to do shit. The same flip flop will still happen, but instead of 4-year executive terms, it will be driven by lifetime court appointments. The court is going to remain Republican for the foreseeable future, unlike the presidency.

> It won't force Congress to do shit. In which case the states will step in. We're already seeing this happen post- Dobbs , with blue states falling over themselves to create safe havens. If Congress can't get anything done and the courts won't let the executive branch do anything then that trend will continue with workers' rights and everything else. Maybe our problem is that the country has just gotten too big to r…

> Maybe our problem is that the country has just gotten too big to run effectively as a single 350-million person democracy, and it's time for the state governments to step up and stand up for their people.

Or, perhaps, we just need to alter some aspects of that government to run better. For example: changing the size of the House of Representatives to make it more representative. It wasn't supposed to be stuck at 435.

Switching away from first past the post voting would also help enable more diverse voices within the government.

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

#485

Post by [deleted] »

consumer451 wrote: post #382
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…

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?

[deleted]

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

#486

Post by lolinder »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #476
itsdavesanders wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And imagine how our allies feel. If you can’t count on the U.S. for more than about 3 years at a time, then you quickly move away from them and insure you aren’t so tied to them that a foreign election suddenly makes you vulnerable. Which then makes everyone weaker as a whole and easier to pick off. Which is why U.S. foreign adversaries have been actively sowing chaos for a decade.

I am not buying this argument. America for better or worse (mostly worse) has a two party system that in practice functions as mostly a uniparty prioritizing defense spending, entitlements, and the economy, with some lip service paid to red meat/blue meat issues to ensure power is maintained. This means you can reliably predict what American policy will be in any given moment for any given president. Besides, EU memb…

> Arguably, the biggest wrinkle to this was Trump

You say this as though he isn't favored to win the next election and take over the presidency and all its policies in about six months.

Edit in response to the edit: I latched onto this because it's entirely relevant to the rest of your point. Trump is the Republican party today, and his foreign policy dictates the acceptable stances for the majority of Republicans in Congress. His foreign policy is absolutely terrifying to our allies.

I didn't latch on to Trump because he's a big name, I latched on to Trump because you deliberately glossed over him as though he weren't an enormous glaring example of how quickly our foreign policy can (and is likely to!) pivot.

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

#487

Post by curiousllama »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #448
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?

It sounds to me like they just gave the legislative branch some of it's responsibility back. Delegating their job to the executive branch of government has created agencies that make and enforce rules themselves, and ultimately operate at the whim of whoever the president happens to be at the time. If congress wants to delegate details to experts they could explicitly state that in the law, and create their own organ…

> The laws should state something like "food purity should be within %x of yada yada, where x is updated yearly by the appropriate agency" Then it's up to the courts to decide if the law was broken or not.

This is kind of true, but also belies the depth of the Chevron change. In this example, plaintiffs can now, for example, challenge how the "X%" calculation is done. What's an appropriate methodology?

In the past, courts deferred to the agency: as long as it's scientifically valid + consistent, it's up to the regulator, not a judge. Now, it's up to a judge.

So if I sue and say "you should use a 0.01 alpha for calculations, not 0.05" for your X% calculation, then a judge makes the methodological decision, not the statistician.

IMO, it's not really reasonable for congress to design statistical methodologies as part of the text of a bill.

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

#488

Post by stvswn »

kergonath wrote: post #163
bell-cot wrote: post #93

Before proclaiming that this outcome is horrible - Please consider that the Good Guys (your opinion) might not win the election in November. And that you might not want the courts auto-deferring to all the plausible-ish interpretations of ambiguous laws which gov't agency officials appointed by the Bad Guys (your opinion) might suddenly add the Official Agency Interpretations next year.

That is not a question of good guys and bad guys. It’s just that a system where the legislative branch micro-manages things like electrical safety in new homes to what you’re allowed to put in baby formula is completely unworkable. If “the bad guys” get into power, then the agency is still checked by the courts that are perfectly able to stop blatant overreach. OTOH, congress physically cannot keep abreast of the sta…

It is incorrect, but widespread among left-leaning pundits, that this ruling will force Congress to micromanage everything that would normally be left to the agencies. Agencies can still make rules. If Congress would like to be out of the details business, they can even write statutes that explicitly delegate rule making to the agencies. What this does is prevent agencies from acting in ways that are easily interpreted as _not_ conforming with law. The Chevron test told judges that they have to defer to the agencies _even when_ they conclude that the agencies are misreading the laws, as long as the agencies aren't being manifestly unreasonable. This has led to agencies very savilly expanding their power without any new statutory authority simply because they have good lawyers who know how to craft it in a way that survives a Chevron test. The SC just said something I find completely reasonable: from now on, judges have to interpret the law as its written and decide cases based on whether or not the agency is complying with the law. They cannot abrogate their duties to be the experts on legal analysis simply out of a desire to defer to the agency's interpretation. I think it's correctly decided because Chevron is an illogical mess -- why is it that in one situation and one situation only, our legal system treated one of the parties in a suit as inherently having more authority to intepret the law than a court itself? It is not persuasive to me that we should say "well, because the courts can't be experts," as this is not an argument that works in any other situation where a court must make legal rulings in the face of experts -- such as bankruptcy proceedings, antitrust cases, etc.

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

#489

Post by k33n »

megaman821 wrote: post #205
dctoedt wrote: post #98

Time for Congress to start aggressively using its express constitutional power (under the Exceptions and Regulations Clause of Article III) to circumscribe federal courts' power to set aside congressional directives such as the ones that led to Chevron deference. "Separation of powers" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution; it's a bootstrapped creature of power-seeking judges.

If Congress had their shit together enough to reign in the federal courts, there wouldn't be so many federal laws that were ambiguous in the first place. Not sure what the shockwaves of this Chevron decision will be, but I am a fan of forcing the legislative branch to legislate again.

How do you suggest that Congress "rein in" a coequal branch of government?

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

#490

Post by CobrastanJorji »

Why did the Supreme Court invent Chevron deference 40 years ago? To serve corporations. It's not called "Chevron" because it's about inverted V's, after all. The EPA wanted to interpret the law in a way that Chevron liked and the Natural Resources Defense Council did not like, so the Supreme Court said "no, no, the EPA gets to decide, we are but poor unqualified judges."

Why did the Supreme Court take it away? Because agencies started interpreting laws in ways that corporations did not like, so the Supreme Court changed its tune to "who are these agencies to interpret the law, we are the judges here."

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