7 ms·

The Supreme Court made the right decision. Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making re

by avalys 2y ago

The Supreme Court made the right decision. Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making regulation, rather than experts in regulatory agencies. What they said is that now, if a statute is ambiguous, a regulatory agency makes a regulation that falls within that ambiguity, and someone files a lawsuit, the courts can play their standard, established role in resolving the ambiguity and figuring out the intent of Congress and determining whether the regulation is authorized by statute. Previously, Chevron deference required the courts to defer to the agency's interpretation of the statute, regardless of how unreasonable that interpretation was. This was abused by people who used it as a loophole to push through regulation which they knew would not be politically viable in Congress. Chevon deference allowed an end-run around democracy. And also led to uncertainty - because these regulations were politically controversial and not supported by law, just by executive branch fiat, they are prone to being revoked whenever the party holding the presidency changes. If a topic is important enough, Congress can always resolve any of these issues by amending the relevant statute. All of these controversies over Supreme Court decisions really come down to people who are advocating for positions and regulations which are unachievable through the normal political, legislative process in the US getting upset that the Supreme Court is not allowing them to enact these policies through backdoors and loopholes rather than the democratic process.

thatguy0900 2y ago
People see congress as being so broken that anything that asks congress to act is seen as a bad thing, is the problem.
- xp84 2y ago
  you're not wrong -- basically as soon as I read 'Congress can' I immediately LOL'd. Unfortunately I don't have any solution to this, as our system was clearly designed for, at bare minimum, a Congress which is at least slightly capable of functioning. Everything I've seen in the past decade though suggests that is no longer a reasonable thing to expect to be true at any point.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    Maybe congress would function better if we brought back Congressional fist fights on the house floor?
    - xyst 2y ago
      Better yet, trial by combat. A battle to death.
  - Yizahi 2y ago
    "any solution to this" Abolish first past the post system everywhere. Actually all countries should do it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tersers 2y ago
Please name me some times this was used to the detriment of society
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  By having to spend money for all this environmental and safety regulation, my companies cannot maximize shareholder value and I cannot make all the money I could be making.
- Alupis 2y ago
  How about the incalculable amount of money wasted on "compliance devices" for firearms? Citizens were/are directly and negatively impacted by the flavor-of-the-week regulations BATF decided on a whim. People are literally guessing how the BATF might decide to interpret vague laws from the 30's this week... only for them to change their mind next week and turn everyone into criminals, only to reverse course a few months later, etc. The lawmakers skirted their responsibility to create the gun control laws some people want, so the BATF would just make some up and enforce them. Imagine having your life ruined because some unelected crusading bureaucrat decided the stock you've had on your rifle for 10 years is suddenly illegal today...
  - plorg 2y ago
    But then surely this is something Congress can and should remedy? Why is it a better outcome that the least accountable branch of government should claim interpretive power that was not granted to it by Congress?
    - Alupis 2y ago
      The SCOTUS decision basically told Congress they must write the laws instead of allowing agencies/departments to create their own "laws" that were not actually laws but were enforced like laws. So, no, the power did not shift entirely to SCOTUS like some people have been mislead into believing. The power was taken away from the Executive Branch and restored to the Legislative Branch - as it should have been all along. The Executive Branch (the president and their staff/appointees including those running the various enforcement agencies such as BATF, EPA, etc) have never been authorized to create laws... yet they got away with it anyway.
le-mark 2y ago
In the army I knew a guy who did something so dumb a new regulation was added to the army regulations around UCMJ or what could be prosecuted. I have long forgotten the number unfortunately. But the point is that no statute or regulation can ever specify every eventuality and it’s folly to think it can be done. Edit the case was a soldier (the guy) had orders to attend a school, went awol enroute. He was not reported awol, the destination nor origin commands knew what happened. He got a guilty conscience and came back to originating command. The reg was about who was required to report the awol. Since the awol was never reported he couldn’t be prosecuted.
- BostonFern 2y ago
  As the comment you’re replying to explains, statutes don’t have to define every eventuality. As before, ambiguities are resolved as they come up. Now it’s just the courts who decide them instead of agency officials.
  - dclowd9901 2y ago
    By the courts. Since we can never cover every eventuality, that effectively makes courts de factor regulators. Notably, the group of politicians who’s appointed the members of the court who voted this way stand the most to gain from it. I think that fact can’t be ignored.
SomaticPirate 2y ago
In terms of realpolitik though, Congress is so deadlocked that new proposed legislation is unlikely to ever come and if it does, lobbyists and special interests will have plenty of time to render it toothless. The coverage is not hyperbolic, it hits on real concerns that the courts will now be involved in every controversial decision. Previously, if your company was involved in something that would fall under the governance of a governmental agency, like dumping some new chemical into a body of water, the EPA could be brought in to make a ruling on the matter. Now, that ruling might not be in the best interest of that company depending on the level of regulatory capture. In our current world, that organization will now file a lawsuit to block the ruling of the govt organization and cite the removal of Chevron deference. Then a long, tedious process of court rulings might follow. With the ultimate ruling mentioning "the Clean Water Act does not mentioned chemical XYZ specifically by name". Resulting in the company continuing to release said chemical. When a new toxic chemical enters the water supply near your home, I hope that your congressman responds promptly. In my experience, they have been quite slow moving on most of my concerns...
- BostonFern 2y ago
  Is there evidence for the assumption that courts will be slower at responding to urgent cases than agencies, keeping in mind tools of the court like imposing a stay? In a complementary hypothetical scenario where you’re not being saved but rather harmed by an agency’s actions, with the matter being decided in the courts, you can now expect to have well established protections like due process and appeal.
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    Presidential Immunity sandbagging.
- bigtex 2y ago
  So unelected judges should be required to rely on the testimony of unelected bureaucrats?
  - 2y ago
cyberax 2y ago
> Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making regulation, rather than experts in regulatory agencies. They said EXACTLY that. There is absolutely NOTHING redeeming in the SCOTUS decision. Prior to that, courts were required to defer to the agencies for the matter of facts. E.g. if PFAS is a pollutant. Now everyone can just say: "I don't belive PFAS is a pollutant, so there's no need to clean it up". And this will have to be argued all the way up to the SCOTUS.
- xyst 2y ago
  By the time it gets to the SCOTUS, many people will die. Generations of people impacted in polluted areas. It’s a shit situation.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  You can't just say "I don't believe PFAS is a pollutant", you have to convince a judge of that, and the EPA gets to make the opposite case. Then the judge hears everyone's arguments and makes a decision, because that's what judges do.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > You can't just say "I don't believe PFAS is a pollutant", you have to convince a judge of that It's not like the Fifth Circuit judges routinely ignore and misquote plain facts, yeah? The next issue is that you'll be pitting boring government bureaucrats against highly paid legal teams that can outdazzle pretty much anyone. But even putting all of this aside, the rulemaking process itself is not fast by design because it gives all the interested parties plenty of time to interact with the agencies. A typical rule takes about 3 years to finalize. Then you can delay it for 4-5 years by simply going through the court process as slowly as you can. And if you get a split judgement by going into the la-la land of East Texas judges and in parallel by suing in another location, you can drag it out even more by waiting on the SCOTUS! So you're looking at a _decade_ between a rule and its implementation. But wait, there's even more! You can then question the enforcement actions in a separate lawsuit! You won't be able to drag it out as much, but another 2-3 years is a possibility. Some libertardians suggested: "Hey! We now can sue government agencies for allowing Teh Evul Glyphosate, and GMOs!". Nope, you can't. You don't have standing for that. It's a strictly pro-polluters ruling.
plorg 2y ago
If the law is ambiguous and the executive interprets it in a way that is outside of Congress' intent, surely Congress could also clarify that law. One could just as (or more) easily assume that it is not the judiciary's role to tell the executive what Congress wanted, considering that Congress is right there to do it with their own voice. The judiciary would come in if Congress thought the executive was doing something outside of their intent. What this position is really saying is that if Congress leaves something underdetermined the executive must defer to the judiciary in order to understand their own rulemaking. I agree with you that the real problem here is a schlerotic political system, but in that context SCOTUS is actually making it worse by inserting itself unnecessarily into the process.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The executive isn't supposed to be making rules at all. Congress makes the rules, courts interpret them. The executive branch is the prosecutor's office; they don't get to decide what things are crimes.
fzeroracer 2y ago
> Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making regulation, rather than experts in regulatory agencies. No, they literally said that. Multiple times in the ruling [1] [2]. The point is that the court can now take any interpretation of the laws as reason to say the agency has no right to do what they're doing, instead of first checking if the agency and its interpretation is valid and relying on experts. [1] "Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding" [2] "Under the APA, it thus “remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”
vharuck 2y ago
>Chevon deference allowed an end-run around democracy. I would consider officials appointed by the regularly elected position of President as more democratically controlled than federal judges. If people dislike how the President is handling EPA rules, they can vote for a different president next time. Or voice their concerns to their elected Congresspeople, who could amend the laws. If SCOTUS rules in a way I strongly disagree with, I'm SOL. And, because of of stare decisis, that ruling is likely to stand for a long time. >And also led to uncertainty - because these regulations were politically controversial and not supported by law, just by executive branch fiat, they are prone to being revoked whenever the party holding the presidency changes. Firstly, Chevron Deference required rules to be reasonable interpretations of the law. So it wasn't total fiat. Also, there are other laws that prevent capricious changes. The new rule must be proposed, published, and allowed time for public comment. Also, Chevron allowed courts to rule on ambiguous matters of law (e.g., how two laws interacted). Because judges are experts in federal laws. But for other questions, such as the dissent's citation of a case over whether a Pacific Northwest colony of squirrels qualified as a separate population from other parts of the country, there's no way I'd trust a judge to understand a crash course on biology, genetics, and ecology delivered by opposing sides in the span of a court case. Now imagine they do this all the time for different subjects. I doubt many judges look forward to these cases.
- 23B1 2y ago
  > I would consider officials appointed by the regularly elected position of President as more democratically controlled than federal judges. the "more democratically controlled" members of government are congress, who make the laws, and can make more laws. That's their job – not anyone else's.
  - vharuck 2y ago
    Chevron never tied Congress' hands. They always had the ability to amend the law if the Executive branch did something Congress didn't want. Let's be clear: a lot of these rules are policy decisions. Congress and the Executive are supposed to hash out policy, seeing as they're the only branches controlled by elections. The Judiciary shouldn't have a say. But, without Chevron Deference, policy can be decided by a private party and a judge. That's a terrible way to guide a country.
cduzz 2y ago
Sure, the SCOTUS respects congress's views, except for things like voting rights, where the congress renewed it 390–33 and unanimously and was signed by a GW Bush. So they'll respect the congress when they agree with it and overturn it when they disagree. And they'll disagree with findings of fact and overturn those when they disagree, they'll find standing where there is none. Heads I win, tails you lose.
derbOac 2y ago
The ruling itself ironically provides an example of why it is a bad ruling: Gorsuch, authoring the majority opinion, repeatedly referred to "nitrous oxide" rather than nitrogen oxides. If the SCOTUS justices can't get this right, in the opinion itself, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on other scientific matters that are more complex? It also seems legally dubious to me, because there will always logically be some level at which interpretive discretion is allowed in executing some statute. Laws cannot fundamentally anticipate every single scenario to which they might be applied. It's disingenuous or naive to believe that regulation is any different at some fundamental level from any other form of statute. You can also turn your own argument on its head: if someone has a problem with a regulatory interpretation, they can always appeal it. SCOTUS could have ruled something more reasonable along these lines, to clarify how to establish abuse of regulation. I tend to be deregulatory in my political sympathies in a lot of domains, but this is not how to go about the issue, in my opinion.
- saurik 2y ago
  Why wouldn't the argument here that courts and judges aren't experts at anything not apply to every single decision they make? If we're simply going to decide that courts shouldn't be trusted to decide anything "hard", shouldn't our local courts also defer to local government officials? It certainly would make it easier on the District Attorney's office if the County Judges were intended to "defer" to their opinion on forensics, and I'm sure the local sewer district would love to not have to waste time bringing expert witnesses to court to argue their case for violation of a local ordinance.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
> ... really come down to people who are advocating for positions and regulations which are unachievable through the normal political, legislative process in the US... I worry that "the normal political, legislative process" will be the death of our planet.
norir 2y ago
> All of these controversies over Supreme Court decisions really come down to people who are advocating for positions and regulations which are unachievable through the normal political, legislative process in the US getting upset that the Supreme Court is not allowing them to enact these policies through backdoors and loopholes rather than the democratic process. Is that you, Justice Gorsuch?
swaginator 2y ago
[flagged]
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  [flagged]
gaganyaan 2y ago
It will just end up like Qualified Immunity. "Your honor, I was wearing a green shirt, this is unprecedented territory and totally different and Congress needs to clarify". What historical uses of the Chevron deference do you actually find objectionable? Why can't those specific instances have been pushed back on, instead of just scrapping the whole thing?
monkeybutlers 2y ago
A quick check of avalys's other posts shows that he opposes enforcement of pretty much every law, and that he always has an excuse for why this makes sense. He's not coming at this from any sort of morality, or logic, or sound jurisprudence, or love of democracy or anything else... he's just another white collar anarchist who thinks he'll get slightly richer if the government is weaker.
tzs 2y ago
> Previously, Chevron deference required the courts to defer to the agency's interpretation of the statute, regardless of how unreasonable that interpretation was. No it didn't. It only required deference to reasonable interpretations by the agency.
NPC82 2y ago
The courts should not be able to make and apply any standards to government operations that it conveniently sees and defines as ambiguous, especially since a lot of their standards are frequently seen as more than ambiguous. We've seen this with their emergency "posthumous" clarifications of the Roe ruling by conflicting EMTALA, fertility clinics, and decades of health science.
dangus 2y ago
I think it's easy to argue against it being the right decision simply due to the people involved on each side of the case. For one, it was a very "partisan" ruling being a 6-3 conservative court ruling. The fishing companies' legal representation for the case includes organizations with funding linked to Charles Koch, and the side that is condemning the outcome is an environmental protection group. I'm no bootlicker. I don't side with corporations and billionaires over environmental protection groups unless there's an extremely compelling case for it. I think that while you may technically be right about the flaws in the status quo, the end result of the ruling will be that companies now have a new mechanism to litigate every bad thing they want to dump into the environment to death whereas previously the administrative regulatory agencies were able to quickly strike down nonsense like that. I think they'll have a better avenue to now claim rules are ambigious that aren't actually ambiguous, appeal appeal appeal, and just keep going at it until they find friendly or uninformed judges. And let's not forget that administrative agencies don't have a complete lack of enforceable ethics rules like the Supreme Court does. If a company wants to claim a chemical is ambiguously dangerous, they can now litigate the hell out of it all the way up to a surpreme court where a direct bribe to a judge is 100% legal.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dyauspitr 2y ago
All of that still filters down to- experts at agencies don’t have the final say, naive judges and a deadlocked congress do. It’s a terrible decision and everyone understands it correctly.

by avalys 2y ago

thatguy0900 2y ago

People see congress as being so broken that anything that asks congress to act is seen as a bad thing, is the problem.

xp84 2y ago
you're not wrong -- basically as soon as I read 'Congress can' I immediately LOL'd. Unfortunately I don't have any solution to this, as our system was clearly designed for, at bare minimum, a Congress which is at least slightly capable of functioning. Everything I've seen in the past decade though suggests that is no longer a reasonable thing to expect to be true at any point.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  Maybe congress would function better if we brought back Congressional fist fights on the house floor?
  - xyst 2y ago
    Better yet, trial by combat. A battle to death.
- Yizahi 2y ago
  "any solution to this" Abolish first past the post system everywhere. Actually all countries should do it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tersers 2y ago

Please name me some times this was used to the detriment of society

warkdarrior 2y ago
By having to spend money for all this environmental and safety regulation, my companies cannot maximize shareholder value and I cannot make all the money I could be making.
Alupis 2y ago
How about the incalculable amount of money wasted on "compliance devices" for firearms? Citizens were/are directly and negatively impacted by the flavor-of-the-week regulations BATF decided on a whim. People are literally guessing how the BATF might decide to interpret vague laws from the 30's this week... only for them to change their mind next week and turn everyone into criminals, only to reverse course a few months later, etc. The lawmakers skirted their responsibility to create the gun control laws some people want, so the BATF would just make some up and enforce them. Imagine having your life ruined because some unelected crusading bureaucrat decided the stock you've had on your rifle for 10 years is suddenly illegal today...
- plorg 2y ago
  But then surely this is something Congress can and should remedy? Why is it a better outcome that the least accountable branch of government should claim interpretive power that was not granted to it by Congress?
  - Alupis 2y ago
    The SCOTUS decision basically told Congress they must write the laws instead of allowing agencies/departments to create their own "laws" that were not actually laws but were enforced like laws. So, no, the power did not shift entirely to SCOTUS like some people have been mislead into believing. The power was taken away from the Executive Branch and restored to the Legislative Branch - as it should have been all along. The Executive Branch (the president and their staff/appointees including those running the various enforcement agencies such as BATF, EPA, etc) have never been authorized to create laws... yet they got away with it anyway.

le-mark 2y ago

In the army I knew a guy who did something so dumb a new regulation was added to the army regulations around UCMJ or what could be prosecuted. I have long forgotten the number unfortunately. But the point is that no statute or regulation can ever specify every eventuality and it’s folly to think it can be done. Edit the case was a soldier (the guy) had orders to attend a school, went awol enroute. He was not reported awol, the destination nor origin commands knew what happened. He got a guilty conscience and came back to originating command. The reg was about who was required to report the awol. Since the awol was never reported he couldn’t be prosecuted.

BostonFern 2y ago
As the comment you’re replying to explains, statutes don’t have to define every eventuality. As before, ambiguities are resolved as they come up. Now it’s just the courts who decide them instead of agency officials.
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  By the courts. Since we can never cover every eventuality, that effectively makes courts de factor regulators. Notably, the group of politicians who’s appointed the members of the court who voted this way stand the most to gain from it. I think that fact can’t be ignored.

SomaticPirate 2y ago

In terms of realpolitik though, Congress is so deadlocked that new proposed legislation is unlikely to ever come and if it does, lobbyists and special interests will have plenty of time to render it toothless. The coverage is not hyperbolic, it hits on real concerns that the courts will now be involved in every controversial decision. Previously, if your company was involved in something that would fall under the governance of a governmental agency, like dumping some new chemical into a body of water, the EPA could be brought in to make a ruling on the matter. Now, that ruling might not be in the best interest of that company depending on the level of regulatory capture. In our current world, that organization will now file a lawsuit to block the ruling of the govt organization and cite the removal of Chevron deference. Then a long, tedious process of court rulings might follow. With the ultimate ruling mentioning "the Clean Water Act does not mentioned chemical XYZ specifically by name". Resulting in the company continuing to release said chemical. When a new toxic chemical enters the water supply near your home, I hope that your congressman responds promptly. In my experience, they have been quite slow moving on most of my concerns...

BostonFern 2y ago
Is there evidence for the assumption that courts will be slower at responding to urgent cases than agencies, keeping in mind tools of the court like imposing a stay? In a complementary hypothetical scenario where you’re not being saved but rather harmed by an agency’s actions, with the matter being decided in the courts, you can now expect to have well established protections like due process and appeal.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  Presidential Immunity sandbagging.
bigtex 2y ago
So unelected judges should be required to rely on the testimony of unelected bureaucrats?
- 2y ago

cyberax 2y ago

> Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making regulation, rather than experts in regulatory agencies. They said EXACTLY that. There is absolutely NOTHING redeeming in the SCOTUS decision. Prior to that, courts were required to defer to the agencies for the matter of facts. E.g. if PFAS is a pollutant. Now everyone can just say: "I don't belive PFAS is a pollutant, so there's no need to clean it up". And this will have to be argued all the way up to the SCOTUS.

xyst 2y ago
By the time it gets to the SCOTUS, many people will die. Generations of people impacted in polluted areas. It’s a shit situation.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
You can't just say "I don't believe PFAS is a pollutant", you have to convince a judge of that, and the EPA gets to make the opposite case. Then the judge hears everyone's arguments and makes a decision, because that's what judges do.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > You can't just say "I don't believe PFAS is a pollutant", you have to convince a judge of that It's not like the Fifth Circuit judges routinely ignore and misquote plain facts, yeah? The next issue is that you'll be pitting boring government bureaucrats against highly paid legal teams that can outdazzle pretty much anyone. But even putting all of this aside, the rulemaking process itself is not fast by design because it gives all the interested parties plenty of time to interact with the agencies. A typical rule takes about 3 years to finalize. Then you can delay it for 4-5 years by simply going through the court process as slowly as you can. And if you get a split judgement by going into the la-la land of East Texas judges and in parallel by suing in another location, you can drag it out even more by waiting on the SCOTUS! So you're looking at a _decade_ between a rule and its implementation. But wait, there's even more! You can then question the enforcement actions in a separate lawsuit! You won't be able to drag it out as much, but another 2-3 years is a possibility. Some libertardians suggested: "Hey! We now can sue government agencies for allowing Teh Evul Glyphosate, and GMOs!". Nope, you can't. You don't have standing for that. It's a strictly pro-polluters ruling.

plorg 2y ago

If the law is ambiguous and the executive interprets it in a way that is outside of Congress' intent, surely Congress could also clarify that law. One could just as (or more) easily assume that it is not the judiciary's role to tell the executive what Congress wanted, considering that Congress is right there to do it with their own voice. The judiciary would come in if Congress thought the executive was doing something outside of their intent. What this position is really saying is that if Congress leaves something underdetermined the executive must defer to the judiciary in order to understand their own rulemaking. I agree with you that the real problem here is a schlerotic political system, but in that context SCOTUS is actually making it worse by inserting itself unnecessarily into the process.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The executive isn't supposed to be making rules at all. Congress makes the rules, courts interpret them. The executive branch is the prosecutor's office; they don't get to decide what things are crimes.

fzeroracer 2y ago

> Unlike the hyperbolic coverage in the press - the decision did not say that judges are now responsible for making regulation, rather than experts in regulatory agencies. No, they literally said that. Multiple times in the ruling [1] [2]. The point is that the court can now take any interpretation of the laws as reason to say the agency has no right to do what they're doing, instead of first checking if the agency and its interpretation is valid and relying on experts. [1] "Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding" [2] "Under the APA, it thus “remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

vharuck 2y ago

>Chevon deference allowed an end-run around democracy. I would consider officials appointed by the regularly elected position of President as more democratically controlled than federal judges. If people dislike how the President is handling EPA rules, they can vote for a different president next time. Or voice their concerns to their elected Congresspeople, who could amend the laws. If SCOTUS rules in a way I strongly disagree with, I'm SOL. And, because of of stare decisis, that ruling is likely to stand for a long time. >And also led to uncertainty - because these regulations were politically controversial and not supported by law, just by executive branch fiat, they are prone to being revoked whenever the party holding the presidency changes. Firstly, Chevron Deference required rules to be reasonable interpretations of the law. So it wasn't total fiat. Also, there are other laws that prevent capricious changes. The new rule must be proposed, published, and allowed time for public comment. Also, Chevron allowed courts to rule on ambiguous matters of law (e.g., how two laws interacted). Because judges are experts in federal laws. But for other questions, such as the dissent's citation of a case over whether a Pacific Northwest colony of squirrels qualified as a separate population from other parts of the country, there's no way I'd trust a judge to understand a crash course on biology, genetics, and ecology delivered by opposing sides in the span of a court case. Now imagine they do this all the time for different subjects. I doubt many judges look forward to these cases.

23B1 2y ago
> I would consider officials appointed by the regularly elected position of President as more democratically controlled than federal judges. the "more democratically controlled" members of government are congress, who make the laws, and can make more laws. That's their job – not anyone else's.
- vharuck 2y ago
  Chevron never tied Congress' hands. They always had the ability to amend the law if the Executive branch did something Congress didn't want. Let's be clear: a lot of these rules are policy decisions. Congress and the Executive are supposed to hash out policy, seeing as they're the only branches controlled by elections. The Judiciary shouldn't have a say. But, without Chevron Deference, policy can be decided by a private party and a judge. That's a terrible way to guide a country.

cduzz 2y ago

Sure, the SCOTUS respects congress's views, except for things like voting rights, where the congress renewed it 390–33 and unanimously and was signed by a GW Bush. So they'll respect the congress when they agree with it and overturn it when they disagree. And they'll disagree with findings of fact and overturn those when they disagree, they'll find standing where there is none. Heads I win, tails you lose.

derbOac 2y ago

The ruling itself ironically provides an example of why it is a bad ruling: Gorsuch, authoring the majority opinion, repeatedly referred to "nitrous oxide" rather than nitrogen oxides. If the SCOTUS justices can't get this right, in the opinion itself, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on other scientific matters that are more complex? It also seems legally dubious to me, because there will always logically be some level at which interpretive discretion is allowed in executing some statute. Laws cannot fundamentally anticipate every single scenario to which they might be applied. It's disingenuous or naive to believe that regulation is any different at some fundamental level from any other form of statute. You can also turn your own argument on its head: if someone has a problem with a regulatory interpretation, they can always appeal it. SCOTUS could have ruled something more reasonable along these lines, to clarify how to establish abuse of regulation. I tend to be deregulatory in my political sympathies in a lot of domains, but this is not how to go about the issue, in my opinion.

saurik 2y ago
Why wouldn't the argument here that courts and judges aren't experts at anything not apply to every single decision they make? If we're simply going to decide that courts shouldn't be trusted to decide anything "hard", shouldn't our local courts also defer to local government officials? It certainly would make it easier on the District Attorney's office if the County Judges were intended to "defer" to their opinion on forensics, and I'm sure the local sewer district would love to not have to waste time bringing expert witnesses to court to argue their case for violation of a local ordinance.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

> ... really come down to people who are advocating for positions and regulations which are unachievable through the normal political, legislative process in the US... I worry that "the normal political, legislative process" will be the death of our planet.

norir 2y ago

> All of these controversies over Supreme Court decisions really come down to people who are advocating for positions and regulations which are unachievable through the normal political, legislative process in the US getting upset that the Supreme Court is not allowing them to enact these policies through backdoors and loopholes rather than the democratic process. Is that you, Justice Gorsuch?

swaginator 2y ago

[flagged]

stonethrowaway 2y ago
[flagged]

gaganyaan 2y ago

It will just end up like Qualified Immunity. "Your honor, I was wearing a green shirt, this is unprecedented territory and totally different and Congress needs to clarify". What historical uses of the Chevron deference do you actually find objectionable? Why can't those specific instances have been pushed back on, instead of just scrapping the whole thing?

monkeybutlers 2y ago

A quick check of avalys's other posts shows that he opposes enforcement of pretty much every law, and that he always has an excuse for why this makes sense. He's not coming at this from any sort of morality, or logic, or sound jurisprudence, or love of democracy or anything else... he's just another white collar anarchist who thinks he'll get slightly richer if the government is weaker.

tzs 2y ago

> Previously, Chevron deference required the courts to defer to the agency's interpretation of the statute, regardless of how unreasonable that interpretation was. No it didn't. It only required deference to reasonable interpretations by the agency.

NPC82 2y ago

The courts should not be able to make and apply any standards to government operations that it conveniently sees and defines as ambiguous, especially since a lot of their standards are frequently seen as more than ambiguous. We've seen this with their emergency "posthumous" clarifications of the Roe ruling by conflicting EMTALA, fertility clinics, and decades of health science.

dangus 2y ago

I think it's easy to argue against it being the right decision simply due to the people involved on each side of the case. For one, it was a very "partisan" ruling being a 6-3 conservative court ruling. The fishing companies' legal representation for the case includes organizations with funding linked to Charles Koch, and the side that is condemning the outcome is an environmental protection group. I'm no bootlicker. I don't side with corporations and billionaires over environmental protection groups unless there's an extremely compelling case for it. I think that while you may technically be right about the flaws in the status quo, the end result of the ruling will be that companies now have a new mechanism to litigate every bad thing they want to dump into the environment to death whereas previously the administrative regulatory agencies were able to quickly strike down nonsense like that. I think they'll have a better avenue to now claim rules are ambigious that aren't actually ambiguous, appeal appeal appeal, and just keep going at it until they find friendly or uninformed judges. And let's not forget that administrative agencies don't have a complete lack of enforceable ethics rules like the Supreme Court does. If a company wants to claim a chemical is ambiguously dangerous, they can now litigate the hell out of it all the way up to a surpreme court where a direct bribe to a judge is 100% legal.

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dyauspitr 2y ago

All of that still filters down to- experts at agencies don’t have the final say, naive judges and a deadlocked congress do. It’s a terrible decision and everyone understands it correctly.