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This court continues to make decisions that might be defensible if you were making them for the first time, but go against decades of precedent in which time ma
by neaden 2y ago
This court continues to make decisions that might be defensible if you were making them for the first time, but go against decades of precedent in which time many laws have been written on the assumption that things would work a certain way. For a group that claims to be holding to tradition they sure are willing to throw things into chaos.
- soraminazuki 2y agoIt depends on which tradition they're talking about. Could it predate the rule of law?
- RajT88 2y agoI believe the conservative judges use the following process flow: 1. Is the prior precedent what I want? If no, go to 2. 2. Is the prior precedent consistent with "textualism", i.e. can we find enough period writings which use the words in the constutition a certain way? If no, go to 3. 3. Is the prior precedent consistent with "originalism", i.e. can we find enough period writings which suggest some people peripherally or directly involved with the drafting of the constitution (or state constutitions) thought of an issue in the same way we want to rule? If no, go to 4. 4. Rule that way anyways, and just do your best to justify it with whatever you dug up for 2 and 3.
- brodouevencode 2y agoSo if something that is seen as a bad idea should be kept in place because "that's the way we've always done it"?
- Drakim 2y agoObviously an outright bad idea should not be kept around just because that's how we have always done it, but don't underestimate the value of predictability and stability. Society can't operates if laws change every day, even if it's driven by a desire to make the laws better.
- Molitor5901 2y ago"Obviously an outright bad idea should not be kept around just because that's how we have always done it.." But who decides that? Laws do NOT change every day and I look forward to your examples of that. The problem is that laws are not changing, and legislators are depending on the courts to do the hard work for them.
- saint_fiasco 2y ago> Society can't operates if laws change every day Funny you should mention that. Gorsuch wrote the exact same thing while arguing in favor of overruling Chevron. You can find it by Ctrl+F-ing the string "though the laws do not". > "Chevron’s fiction has led us to a strange place. One where authorities long thought reserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where the scales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the most powerful, where legal demands can change with every election even though the laws do not, and where the people are left to guess about their legal rights and responsibilities"
- iaw 2y ago[flagged]
- Molitor5901 2y ago[flagged]
- iaw 2y agoThere aren't three, there is every justice between when the decision was decided and now. Republican and Democratic judges upheld stare decisis for years. Note Roberts isn't of questionable character but if he loses the conservative majority he may as well side with them to keep political capital. The other five not so much.
- Molitor5901 2y agoI don't see any of them as having questionable character, because if you focus on one you must consider them all, regardless of politics. You may have noted in Roberts opinion that this does not overturn decisions in the past, only the courts process for deciding them.
- atmavatar 2y agoIf accepting millions of dollars of gifts and trips from individuals with business brought to the court while neither recusing oneself from related cases nor even disclosing said gifts doesn't constitute questionable character, what does?
- Molitor5901 2y agoIt may be immoral, and unethical, but they all do it, have always done it, and if the DOJ thought it was an actual crime I am sure they would have pursued charges in this highly politicized environment we find ourselves in. They may have questionable ethics and morals, all of them, but we're stuck with them for life.
- Latty 2y agoNew laws can be passed to put new policy into place and change those long-standing things explicitly.
- neaden 2y agoMost of the decisions that get to the Supreme Court could reasonably be decided either way. If they were simple, clear decisions they wouldn't make it to the highest court after all. I don't necessarily think the original Chevron decision was the "correct" choice, or the "incorrect" choice, but it was the choice that was made and for 40 years Congress wrote laws and funded agencies on the assumption that that is how things would continue to work. If it had been decided differently all those years ago, then 40 years of laws would have been written differently. It's like the standard plug in the US. Was that the objectively correct choice for what a plug should look like? No. Is there possibly a better configuration that some other country is using? Yes. Would it be worth it to make the change now and make everyone in the country change all of their plugs and electronic devices? No.
- nradov 2y agoIn any of those laws Congress passed in the past 40 years they could have taken the opportunity to codify the original Chevron decision into law. So the fault for any disruptions or bad outcomes lies entirely with them. Voters who are unhappy with the situation should complain to their members of Congress.
- EricDeb 2y agoNo but this is not a bad idea. Why should congress have to be experts and pass hyper specific laws for every aspect of a government agency rather than just deferring to experts?
- stronglikedan 2y agoBecause those experts haven't been able to craft unambiguous laws that aren't up for interpretation. There's nothing stopping congress from deferring to those experts still.
- nradov 2y agoIf Congress lacks expertise on a particular topic then they can front load the process and seek expert input, then write that into the legislation. There's no need to delegate that to the Executive branch for interpretation after the law has been passed. This might slow down the pace of legislation, which would be fine.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThere should be a very high threshold for "we're pressing the reset button on a regulatory infrastructure built on decades worth of precedent, #yolo!", yes.
- lurking15 2y agoit's funny how progressive turn into conservatives, as though we need to cement whatever happened in the 70s things clearly took a turn for the worse since then in many fundamental ways specific to the progressive "revolutions"
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoTo paraphrase Linus: If it's a bug that people depend on then it's not a bug- it's a feature.
- brodouevencode 2y agoBy this logic, slavery was a feature and not a bug.
- epicureanideal 2y agoSometimes bad precedents need to be overturned when decades of evidence have accumulated that it was a mistake, and this is one 100% of people should be happy about. There have been other poorly decided precedents in the past that were later overturned, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
- neaden 2y agoThe legislature are not experts and it is reasonable for them to rely on the experts in the agencies that they created to fine tune implementation. If this was really bad then you should take it up with the legislature to change the laws. This goes into a core misunderstanding I think a lot of Americans have, that we have three co-equal branches of government. That was not the intention, the Legislature is supposed to be the most powerful, creating laws and with the authority to impeach the other two branches, who have no way of removing legislatures. Over time the other two branches have been accumulating power that should belong to the legislature, and I see this as yet another example.
- myworkinisgood 2y ago[dead]
- maxwell 2y agoThen they can consult with experts, put it in a bill, and vote on it, instead of leaving it up to later extra-legislative discretion from political appointees with questionable expertise. It sounds like you're referring to Locke's view on separation of power? He did hold legislative power supreme over the others like you say, but also noted that legislative power derives its authority from the people (consent of the governed), who have the right to make and unmake the legislature. > And when the people have said we will submit to rules, and be governed by laws made by such men... nobody else can say other men shall make laws for them; nor can the people be bound by any laws but as such as are enacted by those whom they have chosen, and authorized to make laws for them. Representation is now extremely poor in the United States. Colonial Americans enjoyed better representation on paper (though virtual) than the average American does today. People have better representation in Commie China. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, with over 700k constituents per rep. Compare Nordic countries, with more like 40k per rep, closer to the U.S. in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The only act of Congress I advocate for is repealing the "Permanent" Apportionment Act of 1929.
- gradus_ad 2y ago"(4) Because Chevron’s justifying presumption is, as Members of the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another. Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best, Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.”" "Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S. 180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go. Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped judicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application."
- iaw 2y agoSo.... Feels like all this ignoring Stare Decisis is setting the groundwork for the court to get packed and become another joke of our governance mechanism.
- spanktheuser 2y agoLong term, I wonder if this destroys the Supreme Court. I see no reason why a future liberal majority would feel bound by any conservative precedent in the future. Replace respect for precedent with whatever position wins a majority and the incentive to pack the court seems irresistible.
- maxwell 2y agoSeems like we're evolving from common to civil law, probably for the better in the long run.
- kergonath 2y agoI tend to agree that civil law should be better over the long term, but I don’t see this Supreme Court letting that happen. They pretend to be deferent to congress when congress is ineffective or on their side, but the script can be easily flipped or used both ways at the same time like they do with states rights. But ultimately they would not let themselves be constrained by a hostile congress.
- maxwell 2y agoThis Court seems to be reducing both executive and judicial power, pushing it back to the legislature where it belongs. But we now have worse representation in the United States than in Communist China, we're an extreme outlier among every OECD country, and this Congress is close to doing literally nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_United_States_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Unit... So the result will be reducing federal power itself, kicking it back to the States. You know, laboratories of democracy. And now seemingly autocracy and theocracy as well...
- ttyprintk 2y agoAnd this would be true for any activist court. To me, the combination of a flaccid Congress plus activist court implies an era of disposable precedents.
- 2y ago
- nradov 2y agoThat is a feature, not a bug. Supreme Court decisions are informed by precedent, not bound by precedent. If that creates chaos it's not their fault. Blame the legislators who wrote bad or vague laws in the first place. If the laws were sufficiently clear and specific then the Supreme Court wouldn't have much work to do. And let's not have any ridiculous claims that the Supreme Court needs to legislate from the bench because Congress is dysfunctional. In most of the areas where Congress has failed to pass new or revised laws there are real divisions or lack of consensus in the country. It's more important to preserve our Constitutional separation of powers even if that leads to bad outcomes on particular issues.
- delecti 2y agoThe US is a common-law country. By stare decisis, the courts are indeed supposed to be bound by precedent.
- tivert 2y ago> The US is a common-law country. By stare decisis, the courts are indeed supposed to be bound by precedent. And that doesn't work, and it didn't even work to start. IIRC, in Britain, before the US was independent, "common law" became so unworkable and and unjust because the courts were so rigidly "bound" by precedent (like you advocate), that a whole other system of law "equity" was created.
- nradov 2y agoYou have misunderstood. The Supreme Court isn't bound by stare decisis. They are free to overturn precedent if they have appropriate rationale. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publications/preview_home/understand-stare-decisis/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
- myworkinisgood 2y ago[dead]
- rufus_foreman 2y ago>> This court continues to make decisions that might be defensible if you were making them for the first time, but go against decades of precedent The Roberts court has overturned fewer precedents per term than any court going back to at least the Warren court which began in 1953. If your criteria for evaluating a court is respect for precedent, you should consider the Roberts court to be a candidate for greatest of all time.
- rootusrootus 2y agoWhat I'm hearing is that qualitative is clearly more important than quantitative.
- tivert 2y ago> What I'm hearing is that qualitative is clearly more important than quantitative. I'm hearing a lot of "my-side likes this, therefore changing it is wrong." Liberals think it's the highest expression of the beauty of our republic when precedent is overturned to take things in a more liberal direction; but when precedent is overturned to take things in a different direction, they think it's an unjust violation of stare decisis and get outraged. As understood (by liberals), the courts are a ratchet that moves things from less liberal to more liberal. To go the other way is evidence of inexcusable corruption and a threat to democracy itself, warranting urgent and extreme action to save society.
- rootusrootus 2y ago> To go the other way is evidence of inexcusable corruption and a threat to democracy itself, warranting urgent an extreme action to save society. So we live in interesting times. Great.
- FireBeyond 2y agoAnd to listen to many conservatives, any time a left-leaning decision is made by the court, we are one step closer to chaos, anarchy, depravity, fire and brimstone and the apocalypse. Don't act like complaints about the courts are just liberal tantrums.
- ImJamal 2y agoHow long as separate but equal a precedent? How many laws were made with that assumption in mind? Just because something is a precedent doesn't mean it is good or should continue.
- saboot 2y agoIt's not even years of precedent, they contradicted themselves on this decision today in their separate ruling on allowing public sleeping bans. Roberts said "Why would you think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgements?". SCOTUS follows tradition when it suits their lobbied interests, and disregards tradition if it contradicts them.
- spiderice 2y ago> Why would you think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgements? A really really good question. And completely compatible with this ruling.
- latency-guy2 2y agoThis reads more like interpretation is at fault rather than the actual ruling. The SC ruled in favor of the state(s), as in the fining for that reason is not unconstitutional or an overreach.
- cryptonector 2y agoYou should read Gorsuch's concurrence. It's all about the meaning of "common law" and "stare decisis". It's quite educational and even eye opening.