5 ms·
There’s a lot of negativity around this ruling here on HN. As a not-lawyer, non expert, I welcome this ruling. The strongest argument I can make in favor of th
by dilippkumar 2y ago
There’s a lot of negativity around this ruling here on HN.
As a not-lawyer, non expert, I welcome this ruling. The strongest argument I can make in favor of this come from the dissenting opinion by Justice Kagan:
> 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 actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court...
In other words, Congress can not get its shit together, but someone still has to do the work of figuring out what rules we should all follow. Congress would much rather play politics and make speeches and theatrical high-drama hearing rather than doing the hard work of legislating laws.
It is obvious that Congress can not get all the details right. Neither can the regulatory body. The only advantage of delegating the work of rule-making to regulators is that the iteration times are faster.
Why are the iteration times faster? It has more to do with the Congress being a dysfunctional body.
When incompetence is rewarded by reduced work loads, incompetence is amplified.
Yes Congress can not get their shit together. But that’s way more visible to voters when their incompetence translates to visible inaction.
This is the way the system should work (in my opinion). Feels like a positive ruling to me.
- eightysixfour 2y ago> When incompetence is rewarded by reduced work loads, incompetence is amplified. What? When incompetence has more responsibility, the effect of incompetence is amplified.
- dilippkumar 2y ago> When incompetence has more responsibility, the effect of incompetence is amplified. Correct. This is the desired effect. Today, Congress hides behind endless procedural votes and dramatic hearings and grandstanding against political opponents and basically doing everything except for useful work. Now, not only are they on the hook, their incompetence is (hopefully) going to be amplified. The all-talk-but-no-legislating politicians will, over the next 20 years, get weeded out one by one.
- eightysixfour 2y ago> The all-talk-but-no-legislating politicians will, over the next 20 years, get weeded out one by one. Can you show evidence of this strategy working somewhere else? This isn't a competitive marketplace where failure to do useful work is punished, what we have learned is that people want grandstanding over effective politicians. The losers won't be the politicians.
- dilippkumar 2y ago> Can you show evidence of this strategy working somewhere else? The best example of this strategy in action would be the US Congress before the 1984 Chevron Deference ruling. Was Congress more effective back then? One way to check if people got more grandstanding or less grandstanding is to see if there was more bipartisan legislature before 1984 than after. There was more bipartisan legislature before 1984 and the difference is dramatic [0][1]. I'm not a social scientist and one could possibly bring up all sorts of other reasons to justify this as a coincidence or caused by something else entirely or whatnot. I don't have the resources here to put together an entire detailed study to find and untangle confounding factors. I will only point out that as many things being common as possible (same congressional body, same voter base, same senators) - the time before Chevron deference was dramatically different from the time after Chevron deference, in terms of what Congress felt it should do to earn reelection. It acted accordingly. [0]. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3636420/journal.pone.0123507.g002.0.PNG?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u... [1]. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-...
- eightysixfour 2y agoThere were so many changes to politics in the 1980s that trying to connect the Chevron ruling to the decrease in bipartisanship, which was already decreasing as the political parties transitioned into opposing alignments, is a serious stretch IMO. The 1980s, starting with the election of Reagan, were when the Conservative party realigned itself entirely in opposition to the Liberals of the time. It is hard to imagine now, but political scientists in the 50s and 60s were arguing we needed more ideologically pure parties because the parties were so intermingled with each other. My pet opinion is that in the late 1960s to early 1970s the United States, for all intents and purposes, became a post-scarcity society. This means that politicians stopped trying to figure out how to make the pie big enough for everyone, which they could find some middle ground arguments for, to how the pie should be distributed. The latter is not a solvable problem, just an endless argument, so here we are.