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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 t

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?

iraqmtpizza 2y ago
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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
No, that isn’t the case. It is saying that regulatory agencies cannot exceed their authority and act like the judicial branch. In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously.
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  > In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously. If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling. But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment. To give an extreme though-experiment example: Lets say Congress 1) packed the Supreme Court with yes-men, 2) passed law giving themselves a huge pay raise and delegating all legislative powers to the President, while they go party. Didn't it just create a a king/dictator? Wouldn't that be unconstitutional?
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      > But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment. A constitutional amendment make it permanent, but Congress never actually lost control. They always had the power - and still do - amend, restrain, clarify their own laws. > Didn't it just create a a king/dictator? Wouldn't that be unconstitutional? In a scenario with a packed Supreme Court of "yes men" there are no bounds to what could happen, so why bother with the thought experiment? In your example, the constitution is already worthless.
- rswail 2y ago
  Not "taken". It was inherently granted by Congress on the joint understanding that the intent was that agencies would engage in rule making to decide areas left undefined within the scope of the law as written. Regulatory agencies are responsible to Congress, the Legislative Branch that has the power to adjust the law to reflect its intent. Judges are not. The understanding is that it is the agencies that are intended to have the best understanding of what they regulate, not judges. Laws were written with this assumption in place, which the Court has just rug-pulled from the operation of the US government.
- tzs 2y ago
  No it isn't. What Chevron said was that when the legislative branch gives an agency power to do X and there is some disagreement between the agency and someone else over precisely what X means and the agency's interpretation is reasonable the courts should use the agency's interpretation.
- throw0101c 2y ago
  > 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 the Constitution). Congress said we will make laws limited actions on Topic X, and when non-prohibited actions are done they must be done in certain ways as prescribed by regulations. Congress further said that they cannot, ahead of time, know every situation that might arise on Topic X, but further rules may be needed. So Congress delegated further rule making, beyond the 'base' An Act to Regulate Topic X, to an agency that Congress itself created and funded via the above Act. An agency only exists because it was created by Congress; it only runs because it is funded by Congress. Congress says, in particular Acts, that some agency should look after the details of Topic X so Congress does not have it. Regulatory agencies have (limited) authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
  - parhamn 2y ago
    > 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?
    - bombcar 2y ago
      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.
bell-cot 2y ago
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.
- dubcanada 2y ago
  Why stop at 21, why not get 1 supreme court from each state? You could get 2 if you wanted to be spicy and setup a sort of room for them all to debate in. Then after they heard the debates they could vote on the matter and if it passes it gets written into law. A sort of congress...
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    I was thinking "enough to routinely overrule the current 9 Justices". Representing individual states, as such, is supposed to be the job of Congressmen. And - with how low-functioning Congress is looking, these days, patterning anything new after them is probably a bad idea.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      So Congress is dysfunctional. The Supreme Court is semi-functional, but functioning in a way that you don't like. So you want Congress to vote in a bunch of new people to fix the Supreme Court. Why do you think that will work, instead of be ruined by the usual Congressional dysfunction? And, if the party in power adds enough Supreme Court justices to routinely overturn the current 9, what makes you think that when the other side is in power, they won't add enough to overturn your 12? The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        > The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It’s by design Funny. Seems like it bent pretty hard in the last election. Why should we only honor the bends to the right?
rootusrootus 2y ago
Congress would have to agree that the power really belongs with them, and agree to limit the Court to only that which is covered in Article III. This is entirely plausible, but I think unlikely in the short term.
remarkEon 2y ago
>granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints? You should read the actual opinion, because that's not what happened here.
Xeoncross 2y ago
If you ignore the labels here, it's a small group of lawyers giving themselves more power because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws. So the large body isn't functioning well and the small body doesn't trust it anymore. So if we make the small body (the supreme court) large like the large body (congress) will that actually fix the issue? Isn't the issue that politicians are corrupt and ignorant of actual expertise in the areas of the laws they pass? How will the Supreme Court overcome this same issue?
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  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.
  - ElevenLathe 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - psunavy03 2y ago
      The totally reasonable practice of "I lost the game, so I'm going to flip over the table and pull a gun."
      - Arainach 2y ago
        When your opponents are lying, cheating, and breaking their own made up rules (no supreme court nominees during the lame duck session unless nominated by a Republican) your characterization is uncalled for.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Yes, the right have been doing it for a long time and it works. Either make it stop working, or copy the thing that works. Don't just handicap yourself to a guaranteed loss.
shrubble 2y ago
Chevron has only been around since 1984. What was done previously?
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  The judgement discusses that. Previously in cases where a statute was ambiguous the courts interpreted it. Chevron changed that to allow the executive to interpret ambiguous laws, but the judgement argues that interpretation of the law is and always has been the role of the courts.
- enragedcacti 2y ago
  Arguably the same thing, from wikipedia: > Chevron is probably the most frequently cited case in American administrative law,[16] but some scholars suggest that the decision has had little impact on the Supreme Court's jurisprudence and merely clarified the Court's existing approach.
- riffic 2y ago
  the company, or the case?
  - kube-system 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
caseysoftware 2y ago
> "This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this?" Yes, absolutely. Congress can do their job and write the laws instead of delegating their authority to the Executive Branch.
- brookst 2y ago
  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.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    It does, the problem is the law as written doesn’t explicitly say that and this court is all about textualism when convenient.
    - adriand 2y ago
      Exactly, only when convenient. A glaring example of this is when they decided that section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment did not disqualify Trump from the ballot. The plain language is not complicated: ---------- No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. ---------- Note that this amendment provides a legislative remedy: Congress can remove the disability by a two-thirds vote. Textualism, but only when it serves their purposes.
      - bentley 2y ago
        The case you’re referring to, Trump v. Anderson, was decided unanimously.
mike_hearn 2y ago
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 them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt, 338 U. S., at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding
- consumer451 2y ago
  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?
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    It won't affect caseload so much as it will affect the balance of power in settlement negotiations. Source: I used to be a lawyer who worked in a heavily regulated field.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    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.
luxuryballs 2y ago
It will force Congress to act rather than allowing agencies to lurk in the shadows.
singleshot_ 2y ago
We could solve all our problems via the ballot box in the legislature, and then these people would have more or less no cases to resolve. That has unfortunately proven unworkable.
TylerE 2y ago
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.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  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.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Yeah, right. All the new conservative justices rammed through recently are cut from Thr exact same cloth.
treflop 2y ago
From my understanding of political science classes, this is how the founders wrote it to be. Actually, it's supposed to be like this… Congress writes laws. Executive interprets those laws and decides ambiguities on its own. Some of those ambiguities are contested so courts decide the outcome. If that court’s outcome is contested, then Congress makes a new ruling explicitly stating what they want. Then it repeats. It’s a cycle of checks and balances that is supposed to loop back into itself. Checks and balances is not a one time thing.
- prrrywinkle 2y ago
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- andyjohnson0 2y ago
  > It’s a cycle of checks and balances that is supposed to loop back into itself. Except that the US doesn't have a functioning legislative branch, so the corrective feedback action never happens. The justices who are making these rulings, and their clients, are very well aware of this.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    To pseudo-quote an influential American Conservative via the All-in podcast: ~"That's right, I want Congress dead-locked, I don't want any new laws passed!" - David O. Sacks
  - 23B1 2y ago
    > Except that the US doesn't have a functioning legislative branch, so the corrective feedback action never happens. That's neither the judiciary's problem nor purview. Its yours (and mine) as voters.
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      What sucks is that as a person in a populous area my vote counts less than someone who lives in a rural area.
prrrywinkle 2y ago
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vkou 2y ago
> Are there any checks against this? Yes, packing the court.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
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efitz 2y ago
Alternative interpretation: The courts just remedied a situation where the executive branch of government had arrogated to itself powers reserved to the legislature by the Constitution. Notably another case ruled on this week did the same thing, by invalidating many agency-specific “administrative courts” and restored the rights of citizens to seek redress in actual courts. I and many others believe that executive branch agencies (“the federal bureaucracy“) has become an out-of-control unaccountable 4th branch of government, and I for one am delighted to see them reined in. Note that agencies will still be able to perform enforcement; they just have to stay within the bounds set by laws and they will no longer be the sole arbiters of those bounds.
intended 2y ago
Hey, that was the goal and plan of the various organizations that got these judges in place. I mean, what checks and balances apply to focused, dedicated, funded campaigns and teams, supported by backers willing to spend multiple decades and the millions necessary - to over turn laws, win minor elections, get judges into lower courts? People spent the time to understand the system so that it could be changed in a way they think is superior. The SC situation is the fruit of such labor. The shortest path solution to something like this is still decades long.
dec0dedab0de 2y ago
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 organization of experts to do the job. Giving the president more power is not a requirement, and enforcement should remain separate. But even then, regulations shouldn't be ambiguous. 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. In the short term this could be a nightmare as companies flaunt all sorts of regulation, but I think overall it is a good thing.
- curiousllama 2y ago
  > 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.
  - dec0dedab0de 2y ago
    but if congress explicitly states that agency xyz will update specific numbers wouldn't that be pretty solid? As far as I can tell, this is just about leaving it up to the courts when things are ambiguous, which is kind of the point of courts.
    - 2y ago
harmmonica 2y ago
Others have said this using different words, but I'm going to chime in anyway. I don't think the courts will have more power. SCOTUS is saying that congress needs to actually make clearer (better?) use of its power by being more explicit when legislating (i.e. when writing laws) instead of relying on the executive branch agencies (for those unfamiliar with the US political structure, agencies like the FDA, EPA, etc. are executive branch agencies that, ultimately, report to whomever is the current US president) to interpret and in many cases read into the laws that congress has passed. The more practical reality of this ruling is, I think, this: there is no world where this is a win for anyone who believes in a bigger US federal government. This is a huge win for those people who believe the power of the federal government should be limited. It's likely the biggest challenge to the size of the federal government in my lifetime and I've been alive for a good bit. The dysfunctional congress that the US currently has makes it a certainty that in the short term countless regulations will be unenforceable and therefore this will be a picnic for anyone who is anti-regulation (note Trump in the debate last night where he talked about scrapping regulation. In comparison to this decision, Trump's regulation-slashing will look like he shot a rifle in comparison to the shotgun SCOTUS just fired). Last comment: this SCOTUS has made it clear that the federal government will be massively restrained. There are two avenues by which they've made this clear: first, they have ruled very aggressively in favor of state's rights (especially when it comes to social issues like abortion), and, second, with this Chevron ruling, federal agencies will not be able to make decisions unless there is explicit intent in the laws that congress passes. I'm having an extremely difficult time wrapping my head around just how epic of a change this SCOTUS has brought to the way the US population is governed, at both the state and federal level. Hard to really comprehend the gravity of the coming change, which will take decades and decades to fully understand.
jmyeet 2y ago
> This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. 100% this but it's not new. This court claim to be "originalists" or "textualists" (even though "originalism" was invented in the 1980s) but has made a massive power grab that we will feel for decades. The "originalists" invented two new doctrines to justify this: 1. History and tradition. Basically the court decides if how something was in 1780 as a legal basis for interpreting the constitution and law. Remember at this time some peoplw were property, women couldn't vote and there was no interracial marriage. This is the "history and tradition" the court seeks to return to; and 2. The major questions doctrine ("MQD"). This has gives sweeping powers to the court to say that even when Congress defined clear language if the consequences are "large" (as the court determines it) then the court can step in and say that Congress wasn't clear enough so the court gets to essentially write legislation and overrule both the legislative and executive branches. MQD was used to justify blocking student loan relief despite Congress giving the president and the education secretary expllicit powers in this regard.
mcguire 2y ago
This is the Supreme Court that claims, "In the summer of 2023, Justice Samuel Alito told the Wall Street Journal that Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, despite the ethical regulations Congress already imposes on the justices" (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/alito-piles-reasons-congress-act-supreme-court-ethics https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/alit...) and that does not have any binding code of conduct.
Lord-Jobo 2y ago
Voting for a reasonable human for president is probably the important check to keep in mind for the next few months
tomgp 2y ago
That’s exactly the argument of this (exhaustive) Harvard law review piece from 2022, that the sole pattern of the supreme courts decision making is that it accrues power to itself at the expense of other branches of government https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supreme-court/ https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supr...
deleted 2y ago
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iraqmtpizza 2y ago

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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

No, that isn’t the case. It is saying that regulatory agencies cannot exceed their authority and act like the judicial branch. In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously.

HelloMcFly 2y ago
> In other words, it was the executive branch that had taken more power previously. If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling.
- tivert 2y ago
  > If I may disagree: it was the legislature that gave the executive branch power, and the judicial branch that essentially approved such an arrangement (unanimously) in the original Chevron ruling. But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment. To give an extreme though-experiment example: Lets say Congress 1) packed the Supreme Court with yes-men, 2) passed law giving themselves a huge pay raise and delegating all legislative powers to the President, while they go party. Didn't it just create a a king/dictator? Wouldn't that be unconstitutional?
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    > But the only way to properly do that is a constitutional amendment. A constitutional amendment make it permanent, but Congress never actually lost control. They always had the power - and still do - amend, restrain, clarify their own laws. > Didn't it just create a a king/dictator? Wouldn't that be unconstitutional? In a scenario with a packed Supreme Court of "yes men" there are no bounds to what could happen, so why bother with the thought experiment? In your example, the constitution is already worthless.
rswail 2y ago
Not "taken". It was inherently granted by Congress on the joint understanding that the intent was that agencies would engage in rule making to decide areas left undefined within the scope of the law as written. Regulatory agencies are responsible to Congress, the Legislative Branch that has the power to adjust the law to reflect its intent. Judges are not. The understanding is that it is the agencies that are intended to have the best understanding of what they regulate, not judges. Laws were written with this assumption in place, which the Court has just rug-pulled from the operation of the US government.
tzs 2y ago
No it isn't. What Chevron said was that when the legislative branch gives an agency power to do X and there is some disagreement between the agency and someone else over precisely what X means and the agency's interpretation is reasonable the courts should use the agency's interpretation.
throw0101c 2y ago
> 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 the Constitution). Congress said we will make laws limited actions on Topic X, and when non-prohibited actions are done they must be done in certain ways as prescribed by regulations. Congress further said that they cannot, ahead of time, know every situation that might arise on Topic X, but further rules may be needed. So Congress delegated further rule making, beyond the 'base' An Act to Regulate Topic X, to an agency that Congress itself created and funded via the above Act. An agency only exists because it was created by Congress; it only runs because it is funded by Congress. Congress says, in particular Acts, that some agency should look after the details of Topic X so Congress does not have it. Regulatory agencies have (limited) authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
- parhamn 2y ago
  > 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?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    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.

bell-cot 2y ago

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.

dubcanada 2y ago
Why stop at 21, why not get 1 supreme court from each state? You could get 2 if you wanted to be spicy and setup a sort of room for them all to debate in. Then after they heard the debates they could vote on the matter and if it passes it gets written into law. A sort of congress...
- bell-cot 2y ago
  I was thinking "enough to routinely overrule the current 9 Justices". Representing individual states, as such, is supposed to be the job of Congressmen. And - with how low-functioning Congress is looking, these days, patterning anything new after them is probably a bad idea.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    So Congress is dysfunctional. The Supreme Court is semi-functional, but functioning in a way that you don't like. So you want Congress to vote in a bunch of new people to fix the Supreme Court. Why do you think that will work, instead of be ruined by the usual Congressional dysfunction? And, if the party in power adds enough Supreme Court justices to routinely overturn the current 9, what makes you think that when the other side is in power, they won't add enough to overturn your 12? The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      > The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It’s by design Funny. Seems like it bent pretty hard in the last election. Why should we only honor the bends to the right?

rootusrootus 2y ago

Congress would have to agree that the power really belongs with them, and agree to limit the Court to only that which is covered in Article III. This is entirely plausible, but I think unlikely in the short term.

remarkEon 2y ago

>granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints? You should read the actual opinion, because that's not what happened here.

Xeoncross 2y ago

If you ignore the labels here, it's a small group of lawyers giving themselves more power because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws. So the large body isn't functioning well and the small body doesn't trust it anymore. So if we make the small body (the supreme court) large like the large body (congress) will that actually fix the issue? Isn't the issue that politicians are corrupt and ignorant of actual expertise in the areas of the laws they pass? How will the Supreme Court overcome this same issue?

matthewdgreen 2y ago
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.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    The totally reasonable practice of "I lost the game, so I'm going to flip over the table and pull a gun."
    - Arainach 2y ago
      When your opponents are lying, cheating, and breaking their own made up rules (no supreme court nominees during the lame duck session unless nominated by a Republican) your characterization is uncalled for.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Yes, the right have been doing it for a long time and it works. Either make it stop working, or copy the thing that works. Don't just handicap yourself to a guaranteed loss.

shrubble 2y ago

Chevron has only been around since 1984. What was done previously?

mike_hearn 2y ago
The judgement discusses that. Previously in cases where a statute was ambiguous the courts interpreted it. Chevron changed that to allow the executive to interpret ambiguous laws, but the judgement argues that interpretation of the law is and always has been the role of the courts.
enragedcacti 2y ago
Arguably the same thing, from wikipedia: > Chevron is probably the most frequently cited case in American administrative law,[16] but some scholars suggest that the decision has had little impact on the Supreme Court's jurisprudence and merely clarified the Court's existing approach.
riffic 2y ago
the company, or the case?
- kube-system 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....

caseysoftware 2y ago

> "This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this?" Yes, absolutely. Congress can do their job and write the laws instead of delegating their authority to the Executive Branch.

brookst 2y ago
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.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  It does, the problem is the law as written doesn’t explicitly say that and this court is all about textualism when convenient.
  - adriand 2y ago
    Exactly, only when convenient. A glaring example of this is when they decided that section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment did not disqualify Trump from the ballot. The plain language is not complicated: ---------- No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. ---------- Note that this amendment provides a legislative remedy: Congress can remove the disability by a two-thirds vote. Textualism, but only when it serves their purposes.
    - bentley 2y ago
      The case you’re referring to, Trump v. Anderson, was decided unanimously.

mike_hearn 2y ago

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 them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt, 338 U. S., at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding

consumer451 2y ago
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?
- gnicholas 2y ago
  It won't affect caseload so much as it will affect the balance of power in settlement negotiations. Source: I used to be a lawyer who worked in a heavily regulated field.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  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.

luxuryballs 2y ago

It will force Congress to act rather than allowing agencies to lurk in the shadows.

singleshot_ 2y ago

We could solve all our problems via the ballot box in the legislature, and then these people would have more or less no cases to resolve. That has unfortunately proven unworkable.

TylerE 2y ago

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.

psunavy03 2y ago
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.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Yeah, right. All the new conservative justices rammed through recently are cut from Thr exact same cloth.

treflop 2y ago

From my understanding of political science classes, this is how the founders wrote it to be. Actually, it's supposed to be like this… Congress writes laws. Executive interprets those laws and decides ambiguities on its own. Some of those ambiguities are contested so courts decide the outcome. If that court’s outcome is contested, then Congress makes a new ruling explicitly stating what they want. Then it repeats. It’s a cycle of checks and balances that is supposed to loop back into itself. Checks and balances is not a one time thing.

prrrywinkle 2y ago
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andyjohnson0 2y ago
> It’s a cycle of checks and balances that is supposed to loop back into itself. Except that the US doesn't have a functioning legislative branch, so the corrective feedback action never happens. The justices who are making these rulings, and their clients, are very well aware of this.
- consumer451 2y ago
  To pseudo-quote an influential American Conservative via the All-in podcast: ~"That's right, I want Congress dead-locked, I don't want any new laws passed!" - David O. Sacks
- 23B1 2y ago
  > Except that the US doesn't have a functioning legislative branch, so the corrective feedback action never happens. That's neither the judiciary's problem nor purview. Its yours (and mine) as voters.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    What sucks is that as a person in a populous area my vote counts less than someone who lives in a rural area.

prrrywinkle 2y ago

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vkou 2y ago

> Are there any checks against this? Yes, packing the court.

oldpersonintx 2y ago
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efitz 2y ago

Alternative interpretation: The courts just remedied a situation where the executive branch of government had arrogated to itself powers reserved to the legislature by the Constitution. Notably another case ruled on this week did the same thing, by invalidating many agency-specific “administrative courts” and restored the rights of citizens to seek redress in actual courts. I and many others believe that executive branch agencies (“the federal bureaucracy“) has become an out-of-control unaccountable 4th branch of government, and I for one am delighted to see them reined in. Note that agencies will still be able to perform enforcement; they just have to stay within the bounds set by laws and they will no longer be the sole arbiters of those bounds.

intended 2y ago

Hey, that was the goal and plan of the various organizations that got these judges in place. I mean, what checks and balances apply to focused, dedicated, funded campaigns and teams, supported by backers willing to spend multiple decades and the millions necessary - to over turn laws, win minor elections, get judges into lower courts? People spent the time to understand the system so that it could be changed in a way they think is superior. The SC situation is the fruit of such labor. The shortest path solution to something like this is still decades long.

dec0dedab0de 2y ago

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 organization of experts to do the job. Giving the president more power is not a requirement, and enforcement should remain separate. But even then, regulations shouldn't be ambiguous. 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. In the short term this could be a nightmare as companies flaunt all sorts of regulation, but I think overall it is a good thing.

curiousllama 2y ago
> 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.
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  but if congress explicitly states that agency xyz will update specific numbers wouldn't that be pretty solid? As far as I can tell, this is just about leaving it up to the courts when things are ambiguous, which is kind of the point of courts.
  - 2y ago

harmmonica 2y ago

Others have said this using different words, but I'm going to chime in anyway. I don't think the courts will have more power. SCOTUS is saying that congress needs to actually make clearer (better?) use of its power by being more explicit when legislating (i.e. when writing laws) instead of relying on the executive branch agencies (for those unfamiliar with the US political structure, agencies like the FDA, EPA, etc. are executive branch agencies that, ultimately, report to whomever is the current US president) to interpret and in many cases read into the laws that congress has passed. The more practical reality of this ruling is, I think, this: there is no world where this is a win for anyone who believes in a bigger US federal government. This is a huge win for those people who believe the power of the federal government should be limited. It's likely the biggest challenge to the size of the federal government in my lifetime and I've been alive for a good bit. The dysfunctional congress that the US currently has makes it a certainty that in the short term countless regulations will be unenforceable and therefore this will be a picnic for anyone who is anti-regulation (note Trump in the debate last night where he talked about scrapping regulation. In comparison to this decision, Trump's regulation-slashing will look like he shot a rifle in comparison to the shotgun SCOTUS just fired). Last comment: this SCOTUS has made it clear that the federal government will be massively restrained. There are two avenues by which they've made this clear: first, they have ruled very aggressively in favor of state's rights (especially when it comes to social issues like abortion), and, second, with this Chevron ruling, federal agencies will not be able to make decisions unless there is explicit intent in the laws that congress passes. I'm having an extremely difficult time wrapping my head around just how epic of a change this SCOTUS has brought to the way the US population is governed, at both the state and federal level. Hard to really comprehend the gravity of the coming change, which will take decades and decades to fully understand.

jmyeet 2y ago

> This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. 100% this but it's not new. This court claim to be "originalists" or "textualists" (even though "originalism" was invented in the 1980s) but has made a massive power grab that we will feel for decades. The "originalists" invented two new doctrines to justify this: 1. History and tradition. Basically the court decides if how something was in 1780 as a legal basis for interpreting the constitution and law. Remember at this time some peoplw were property, women couldn't vote and there was no interracial marriage. This is the "history and tradition" the court seeks to return to; and 2. The major questions doctrine ("MQD"). This has gives sweeping powers to the court to say that even when Congress defined clear language if the consequences are "large" (as the court determines it) then the court can step in and say that Congress wasn't clear enough so the court gets to essentially write legislation and overrule both the legislative and executive branches. MQD was used to justify blocking student loan relief despite Congress giving the president and the education secretary expllicit powers in this regard.

mcguire 2y ago

This is the Supreme Court that claims, "In the summer of 2023, Justice Samuel Alito told the Wall Street Journal that Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, despite the ethical regulations Congress already imposes on the justices" (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/alito-piles-reasons-congress-act-supreme-court-ethics https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/alit...) and that does not have any binding code of conduct.

Lord-Jobo 2y ago

Voting for a reasonable human for president is probably the important check to keep in mind for the next few months

tomgp 2y ago

That’s exactly the argument of this (exhaustive) Harvard law review piece from 2022, that the sole pattern of the supreme courts decision making is that it accrues power to itself at the expense of other branches of government https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supreme-court/ https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supr...

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