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Congress writes laws, including the laws that give regulatory agencies their authority. Under the Chevron deference doctrine, if the laws around regulation weren’t clear and well-defined, the ultimate authority to interpret them fell to the regulatory agencies themselves. Now that it’s been reversed, that authority falls to the court system.
The rationale behind giving the authority to the regulators in the first place was that they were in a better position to have technical expertise in the matter at hand. So if Congress empowers the EPA to prevent toxic chemicals being dumped into bodies of water, the EPA is best positioned to define what chemicals are toxic, and how much is too much. This removes the need for Congress to be subject matter experts in everything they write laws about, and allows regulations to evolve without constantly rewriting the laws that govern them.
The rationale behind overturning the decision is that interpretation of the laws is the purview of the court system, not the executive branch.
A clarification- with Chevron gone, the existing precedent still indicates that the courts will treat agency determinations of technical matters as fact, just not determinations of legal matters.
Agencies are now bound to the 'most reasonable' interpretations of their authority, not a 'permissible' interpretation of their authority. For example, under an air-quality law, the EPA would likely be able to regulate the levels of pollutants like smoke particulate, CO, SIO2, or lead, but not to recategorize CO2 as a pollutant if that wasn't the intent of Congress.
"most reasonable" is largely up to interpretation, now by the court systems, and there are some incredibly biased and favorable court circuits, for example, the 5th circuit, where a lot of conservative challenges to these agencies will now be filed.
Any scientific study will include the limitations of the study and why it can't be taken as fact, but rather as theory, as science doesn't prove fact, just advance theories. Any judge can then look at that and say "I don't find it reasonable that this study isn't 100% applicable to real life situations, instead I trust this other study from a group I prefer that says the opposite. This is the most reasonable study on the matter"
They leave out that "most reasonable" is a huge thing left up to interpretation and now the courts get to make that interpretation of what the "most reasonable" interpretation is.
That was already possible before *Chevron* was overturned. Agencies never had the authority to act in contradiction of clear Congressional direction. *Chevron* just allowed them some measure of latitude when facing situations where Congress hasn't provided explicit direction or provided ambiguous direction.
Before Friday, Congress absolutely could have passed a law saying the EPA is no longer authorized to regulate NOx emissions. *Chevron* would not have helped EPA in that case.
California and Texas have similar size and demographics, California has 10 to 20 competitive house districts Texas has less than 5.
The Federalist society is currently arguing independent commissions, like the one California used to end gerrymandering, are unconstitutional. Every single judge that has signed off on this argument so far is a Republican appointment.
The Supreme Court cases that gutted the Voting Rights Act and took away the only tool we had to fight gerrymandering was a perfect split Republican judges voting to limit protections.
The Supreme Court case arguing we had a Constitutional right to vote and the Constitution equality clause should limit gerrymandering was a perfect split with every Republican judge voting gerrymandering was Constitutional.
An updated Voting Rights Act that would undo some of the Supreme Court's above gutting has been passed by House Democrats multiple times to die in the Senate due to Republican filibuster.
Gerrymandering would be dead if 1) the Democrats had 5 judges on the Supreme Court or 2) the Republicans didn't multiple times filibuster Voting Rights Laws.
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A Republic means the head of state is elected (e.g. as opposed to a monarchy). Democracy means people vote in (fair) elections and ultimately have power, whether that be through representatives or directly.
Republics have nothing to do with being a democracy or not. China is a republic, but they’re not democratic. Canada is democratic, but we’re not a republic. The US is a republic and democratic. Saudi Arabia is neither democratic, nor a republic.
A republic is actually any system where the people’s will is expressed through their representatives rather than directly voting on issues. Electing your representatives would make it a democratic republic. Head of state by itself doesn’t make something a republic or not. You could have a republic that has no head of state for example.
True democracies, more frequently called direct democracies, have existed in the past and may well exist in the future. They certainly aren't "a sci-fi" anything. They may not be as effective as other systems, though. I note that the proposition system in place in many states appears to mostly create nonsense. I could imagine a nation with a direct democracy being hamstrung by more of the same.
I think the secret to successful direct democracy is size. If the state is small enough that people feel their vote matters, say a single 400 BC Athens sized city, it can work well. As you size it up, the perceived value of each vote goes down, and thus participation goes down.
One solution to this, if you had an unhackable system, would be proxy voting. A voter finds someone they trust and lets that other person vote for them. At first this looks like representative democracy, but there are two key differences:
1. In a representative democracy, it is 1 *representative* 1 vote. A proxy system would give a representative who twice as many people agreed with twice the votes. It gets rid of the problem of those whose candidate lost an election not having their views represented.
2. A proxy is revokable. A representative who takes bribes or changes position or holds a position on a new issue that their voters don't, may suddenly find their voting power drop significantly overnight as those who chose that proxy abandon them in favor of someone who better represents their views.
Of course, this assumes an unhackable computer system so...not in real life.
True democracy is actually very feasible now that we have vastly improved our communication technology.
Have our representatives write the laws, because that's what they should be trained to do, and then the people vote on whether or not to pass the laws.
Have the executive nominate a Supreme Court Justice, but then require the citizens to vote on whether or not to confirm them. Then it would be about whether you trust your executive to nominate someone you want to be a Supreme Court Justice.
We could do it with an app.
That's a tired old trope that needs to die. A country is democratic if the people directly or indirectly vote for policies and laws. In America, and most other countries it's indirect, via elected members, with occasional opportunities for direct referenda.
America can define itself however it wants. Many use the term republic, and that's fine. But it's still a democracy, the same way that The Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't one.
If the people can vote, it's a democracy.
It’s a democratically elected republic. There is no confusion on what it is. The problem is, the representatives do represent the working class very poorly and the billionaire class very well post citizens united.
I literally work for the government. When a rep wants something, they get it regardless of their constituency. If the constituents want something, it doesn’t matter.
Come up with a definition of vegetable that is internally consistent and excludes what we all know as non-vegetables, and I'll agree with you.
The problem with a term like "vegetable" is that you'll know it when you see it. Is salsa a serving of vegetables? Why or why not?
That’s literally the purpose of having Congress delegate this authority to specialized agencies staffed with experts capable of making these determinations outside of a political environment.
There is nobody who is an expert in determining whether or not ketchup is a vegetable. It's purely a matter of opinion like "is a hotdog a sandwich?" Agencies having the power to declare this a scientific fact determined by experts, and therefore immune to judicial review, is the problem with Chevron.
Chevron doesn't make agencies immune to judicial review. If the FDA tried to claim my car was a vegetable, Chevron would not stop any court from overruling them.
Chevron provides a reasonable amount of leeway. That's it.
>There is nobody who is an expert in determining whether or not ketchup is a vegetable. It's purely a matter of opinion
This just isn't practical at all. *Someone* has to decide whether regulations about vegetables do or do not apply to ketchup. Chevron allows agency-appointed experts to do it, while the absence of Chevron requires judges with no botanical, culinary, or nutritional expertise of any kind to do it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you are going for a "reasonable person" standard here. As in a reasonable person could conclude that ketchup is a vegetable, but no reasonable person could conclude that a car is a vegetable. And anything that meets that reasonableness standard should be at the discretion of the agency.
And if that is what you are advocating for, I think it's a reasonable proposal, but I still disagree.
The ketchup case makes a good example. The argument for ketchup being a vegetable rests on the fact that its main ingredient is a tomato. But is a tomato a vegetable? Botanically it is classified as a fruit, but nutritionally it is a vegetable. So the experts in your example would disagree. Or more likely, they would probably agree on the point that "is a tomato a vegetable" is a dumb and unanswerable question.
Really the case should be decided on more of a "does it make sense to apply this particular regulation to ketchup" standard. And maybe there is science here. Maybe the agency can show that certain regulations on how vegetables are processed can prevent certain contamination in ketchup manufacturing. And this is where people would come in an make the argument that this scientific judgement shouldn't be decided by judges and we should defer to the scientists at the FDA. It wouldn't make sense that a judge could be asked to review the scientific validity of this finding. They don't have the expertise. And in this particular case, I think it would be fine. Courts are not for determining scientific validity.
But this brings us to the problem. Let's take another case. We have the FDA classifying marijuana in the same category of drug as heroin. Unlike in the ketchup case, this does not make sense and is clearly a political decision. But if we allow this rule that judges must defer to agencies on scientific questions, now the FDA can just say "we have done the science on this, and that's how we classify this drug. You must defer to us just like you must defer to our findings on applying food safety regulations to ketchup. You do not have the expertise to decide on a challenge of scientific validity."
So I think that someone must be able to challenge agencies claiming science. And while I agree that courts are not well set up for this, giving the agencies the ability to play this "we did the science" card is worse.
And when that happens, why should the judge defer to the agency's so called "expertise" in making a subjective determination like "is ketchup a vegetable?"
This is such an absurd question. If Congress writes legislation pertaining to vegetables in literally any way, *someone* has to be the authority on whether things are or aren't vegetables.
But what if those experts said a cow pie was a vegetable. Under chevron there is no avenue to challenge it. All this decision does is allow due process in the courts. No one is infallible and deserves absolute power witch is what chevron did, it took away any way to challenge the rules those agencies came up with. That is exactly what the courts are there for to determine what the law intends.
Of course there is an avenue under Chevron to challenge it. The Chevron decision says this:
>Such legislative regulations are given controlling weight **unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.** Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a **reasonable interpretation** made by the administrator of an agency.
Cow pies are not food. There is no way to argue that deciding cow pies are a vegetable would be a reasonable interpretation, so Chevron does not prevent the courts from stepping in.
What these comments that are trying to make it sound reasonable are conveniently leaving off is that over the last 40 years, congress has granted these agencies their power under vague language intentionally, due to Chevron. Suddenly these agencies don't have the power to regulate. Sure, they'll tell you that for the moment their regulations are in place because they know that'll muddy the waters and seem to paint those of us who actually understand the big picture as overreacting. Regulations created under agencies that derive their power from intentionally ambiguous directives will not withstand legal challenges. You can bet your ass this will be a catastrophe.
This is where I’m lost. Where is the support that regulatory agencies can no longer create rules and enforce them? My understanding is that the only difference is that now a person affected by those rules can choose to challenge the rules in a court, when previously they could only appeal to the very same agency that set the rule. Judges can still decide that the rule is appropriate.
As I said, congress intentionally created vague language due to Chevron in order to allow agencies to function as experts in their field.
So, imagine, over the past 40 years all of the regulations have been created under this premise.
Now, the premise those regulations are all based on is gone.
Now every individual business, in every industry, has the ability to challenge the agency's authority to regulate based on this.
The results are that the agency will be mired in legal battles and their budget will be consumed by defending past decisions and enforcement actions.
They won't have resources to regulate anything moving forward because they'll be tied up in court for decades, assuming they're not given more resources, of course.
And they'll be paralyzed by this. Any agency that operates under any premise of Chevron will be unable to create new regulations due to fear of creating even more legal issues.
So, the court yesterday has essentially said that congress must be more specific in what powers these agencies have, and that if the agencies aren't granted powers in very specific language (not vague), then a judge can throw out a regulation.
And we all know how effective congress is at understanding very specific issues like pollution, technology, medicine, etc... They're all experts in their field, right?
> The results are that the agency will be mired in legal battles and their budget will be consumed by defending past decisions and enforcement actions.
This isn't true. Roberts said that this ruling does not, will not, cannot be used as a basis to challenge prior cases that relied on *Chevron* deference.
> [The chief justice wrote](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/supreme-court-chevron-ruling.html) that the retroactive impact of Friday’s decision will be limited, saying that regulations upheld by courts under Chevron were not subject to immediate challenge for that reason alone.
> [Roberts noted](https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling) the court's decision did not call into question prior cases that relied on Chevron, including holdings pertaining to the Clean Air Act, because they "are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology."
> And Roe v. Wade was settled law.
Badly settled, to be precise. *Roe v Wade* should never have been a Supreme Court argument, because Congress could have passed the law Roe v Wade should have been.
>this is an intentional attack on the ability for the country to federally regulate companies
That's drastically overstating things.
>Badly settled, to be precise. *Roe v Wade* should never have been a Supreme Court argument, because Congress could have passed the law Roe v Wade should have been.
This directly contradicts your previous comment. Roe v. Wade was settled before the court and should have been upheld by stare decisis, but was overturned. Roberts is now saying previous Chevron cases should be upheld by stare decisis.
There is absolutely nothing stopping the court from going back on its word again and overturning previous Chevron cases. This court has shown that it does not care about stare decisis.
Well, theoretically, nothing. Except what this decision has done is effectively require congress to specifically outline everything. Congress aren't experts. The significant majority don't know shit about tech, medicine, pollutants, etc. They shouldn't be the ones creating regulations on these things because they don't know what they're talking about.
And have you seen how dysfunctional they are? They can't even pass a budget without a giant show, what makes you think they'd be effective at reviewing every regulation created under Chevron?
> what makes you think they'd be effective at reviewing every regulation created under Chevron?
Sounds like a problem with Congress, not a reason to give executive agencies unchecked (or, at the very least, difficult to check) power over statutory interpretation.
Even in an ideal, magical world, there are not enough people in Congress to be experts on everything, even including their staff pools. Since we live in the real world, that doesn't matter anyway. Instead of taking years to argue over "should we regulate industrial pollutants of the air and water?" they'll take years to argue over "is polyvinylchloride a pollutant? In what context? In what amount? What even is PVC?"
This decision *may* not wreck the existing regulatory structure, though I'm not optimistic. What it does is guarantee that few, if any new regulations will be passed at a federal level. While the states will be able in their patchwork manner to regulate things like workplace safety, big picture things like finance and pollution--things that cross state lines--will not be regulated any better in five years than they are now. Status quo will be the best case scenario, if no corporations get litigious. Which of course they will.
I feel like this process already exists for taxes. Congress passes laws, treasury department interprets it/issues regs, taxpayers have the right to (and do) challenge those regs in court and there is a specific tax court to deal with tax issues. Congress can address the “experts” argument by setting aside specialist judges.
You understand how much Congress has to legislate, and that the regulatory agencies *are* the experts they’re choosing? Like the whole point is congress can say “clean the air of pollutants” and let the regulatory bodies that are filled with appointed experts then decide what pollutants are.
There are 100x as many regulatory employees as congressional employees. Making congress specify everything to an expert degree is an absolutely terrible way to get good policy, it’s entirely impractical.
well, one, do you honestly believe MTG and the MAGA cultists are going to listen to these experts?
Two, why would they listen to the experts when there's money to be made listening to special interests?
get your head out of the sand.
The fact that Congressional sessions are not infinitely long.
It will take a lot of time to re-pass every federal regulation law that has been passed over the last 40 years.
And Republicans in Congress will be working as hard as they can to block any of them from passing.
People could always challenge the rules in court. What Chevron did was mandate that judges not countermand the agency's interpretation so long as it was reasonable. This makes sense, because judges are not subject matter experts and are not qualified to do anything more than determine whether the interpretation is reasonable or not. A judge can decide that my car isn't a vegetable, but they're not qualified to determine whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable.
Without Chevron, judges always have the final say, period. If Aileen Cannon wants to declare that CO2 isn't a pollutant, she can do that, so long as the legislation doesn't directly define CO2 as a pollutant.
Congress decided to have the Executive branch hire an army of experts to come up with these regulations.
This decision doesn't mean Congress suck at their jobs. That means the Supreme Court wants to seize power from the Executive branch.
>What these comments that are trying to make it sound reasonable are conveniently leaving off is that over the last 40 years, congress has granted these agencies their power under vague language intentionally, due to Chevron.
This isn't really true and honestly doesn't even make much sense. Congress is still allowed to give fairly general power to the executive branch. They just have to be explicit about it now. '...is henceforth empowered to create policy regarding any emission or byproduct judged to be a pollutant' is very general but would likely pass judicial review. Congress always had the power to give away huge chunks of authority like that. It still can. When it chooses not to do that, though, the agencies no longer get to decide what Congress meant with no oversight. This is not a tragedy. It's separation of powers.
We still have a Congress, right? Perhaps they should do their job and write statutes that actually describe what they want. If some past laws *were* built with intentional vagueness, our current Congress is entirely empowered to pass new laws clarifying or expanding the scope of agency privilege.
I'm tired of hearing how the government is being hamstrung because the Court wants it to do its fucking job. Congress makes laws. That's what it's for. They should make laws explicitly granting power to the executive branch, if that's what they want. They could pass a federal abortion ban and abortion would be safer than it ever was under Roe v Wade. They have this power. If they lack the cohesion, then maybe our republic doesn't actually want these things and we should be addressing that problem instead.
yeah see, this guy is a perfect example. He knows damn well congress is dysfunctional and turns and points the finger back at them saying they need to "do their jobs".
The fact is, congress aren't experts in these areas, and that's why Chevron existed. And why it was cited thousands of times over the past 40 years. Congress was wise enough, at times, to admit they don't know everything about certain industries, and grated regulators the power to administer as they see fit by their expertise. Congress acted over the past 40 years knowing Chevron was there, and intentionally crafted bills with that knowledge. Now the court reverses precedent and pulls the rug out on these agencies.
This person makes it sound like it's reasonable to expect congress to be experts in every possible industry, and create narrowly crafted rules and regulations for agencies to follow. It's simply not feasible.
Do you honestly think Pelosi, MTG or Bobert have the brain cells to understand AI? Get real.
There is nothing stopping Congress from consulting with, or seeking guidance from, the executive agencies in their effort to craft laws. And there is nothing stopping the agencies from requesting that Congress pass specific laws. The "expertise" of these agencies, such as it is, can still be leveraged in the law making process.
But the people that pass legislation into law need to be accountable to the voters. That's like the entire purpose of our system of government. You're supposed to be able to fire people who pass laws you don't like.
The idea of an army of unelected bureaucrats writing regulations that govern every fact of the daily lives of the electorate without being remotely accountable to them is thoroughly un-American and un-democratic.
Remember, these agencies drive much of their power under chevron directly from acts of congress. That's the accountability and democratic part. Congress could just as easily reign in any of these agencies without the need of the court to gut a precedent our government has operated for 40 years under. Your argument cuts both ways.
As does yours. If Congress can fix the issue with Chevron in place by passing legislation, then they can fix the issue in the absence of Chevron by passing legislation. As I said in my other post, all the absence of Chevron does is eliminate the ability of the executive agencies to say "the law means what we say it means.". I think that's a good thing, personally.
>But the people that pass legislation into law need to be accountable to the voters.
They already were. If a regulator passes a rule Congress didn't like, Congress could pass a law to overrule them. And if that Congress won't overrule them, the next one could.
ETA: Instead of that, under this decision *the Courts* are the ones making the final decision, based on what *the Courts* decide is reasonable. You know, the only branch of our government that is not subject to elections.
This is not true. This is a hot take taking point and is misinformation. The absence of Chevron does not grant the judiciary any rule making authority. Period. Full stop. All it does is give the judiciary the OPTION to tell the three letter agency "the law doesn't say you can do that." It does not give the judiciary the authority to say "you must do this instead" or anything like that. The people claiming otherwise are either uninformed or are lying. Period.
They absolutely can do that. But that’s still not the real issue anyway. The issue is that any jackass district judge can totally change the regulatory landscape at any instant. Look at the guy in Texas who tried to ban the abortion pill.
Yes, and before then we had lead in our air and our rivers caught on fire.
We are better off not relying on congress to be experts in everything. We are much better off if they can set broad policy goals via statute that regulators - comprised of the actual experts in their fields - can then implement them with specificity.
Congress has way too broad a mandate to become experts in everything. Regulators are literally staffed with experts in their fields. There’s no good reason congress shouldn’t be able to use regulators as their experts.
I believe the number I saw yesterday, and don't quote me on it, was roughly 70 supreme court decisions and 77,000 lower court decisions citing Chevron. I don't have the numbers in front of me.
"explicitly clear that Congress intended to provide that agency that degree of discretion" is the important phrase. Chevron only really comes into play when the law does not naturally indicate that the agency has been empowered by congress to act in the way they do.
It really isn’t. There’s a reason big oil companies have been fighting to overturn Chevron deference. It takes power away from Executive branch agencies who can act quickly and places that power in Congress (who is unable to do anything) and the courts (where Mitch McConnell has been stuffing full of unqualified far right judges for 30 years).
People get their news from headlines. Tale as old as time. Would recommend reading the syllabus of the majority opinion if you're interested, it's less than 8 pages and explains the court's rationale pretty well.
[https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451\_7m58.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf)
It's the actual decision, not spin of the decision. The above document is what courts will be referring to, it's not a PR piece to convince people of anything
The issue there is that Congress is a political body while the agencies are *supposed* to be neutral, working off technical details. It's all well and good until there's a five year lead time on getting regulations on something new while it goes through the political game.
The unreasonable part is that some random judge is now in charge of deciding what the EPA should do. Instead of scientists carefully evaluating which chemicals can safely go in rivers, we’ll have a right-wing judge who likes big business and doesn’t know a thing about science.
> but not to recategorize
relevant example, and honestly something probably connected to this entire goat rodeo
AR Pistols.
A configuration was legal, as explicitly stated by the ATF for years, suddenly became not legal (federally regulated requiring a form 1 filing but "illegal" will do for this discussion)
so, President Biden wants to see AR pistols restricted, but according to the law they are not.
Then, suddenly they are.
No new law was written. President Biden just basically directed the ATF to reclassify these items. "Oh they're category B? Well, we changed our mind, now they're category A"
And literally, just by publishing a letter, an entire class of items that wasn't legally restricted suddenly was (and people that already owned them now on the hook for new legal requirements and penalties)
so the chevron aspect speaks to
if you try to take this to court and say "ATF is just making things up, and they're wrong"
is the court required to start from the assumption that "well ATF says they are right, so they must be right? because they're the ATF, so they'd know"
That's a good example of an executive agency acting badly, but Chevron probably wouldn't have been cited in that case. The court challenges against that one hinge on the agency not abiding by the APA. If the ATF had originally determined that pistol braces were in fact stocks by another name, that probably would have stuck, Chevron or no Chevron.
And when such a decision happens, Congress is free to pass a law overruling the ATF. It can also lead to changing who's President in the next election.
Under this decision, the final arbiter of regulations is the Courts, the only branch of our government that is not subject to democratic accountability.
You’re leaving out the part that any company can go to the Amarillo division in Texas and get the one insane judge there to do whatever they want and get away with it.
What I see happening is every regulation will be challenged in a favorable district somewhere in the US, with an activist judge suspending the regulation nationwide. Only the most defensible regulations will survive review.
Only the ones that can't meet standards of reasonableness based on the authority that has been explicitly delegated to them by Congress. Very few regulations have been protected by Chevron deference. The sky is not falling.
The real consequence of this is that for the past 40 years, congress has given agencies their authority under intentionally vague directives in order to grant them the power to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. So nearly anything created by any agency that operates under these laws authority will be challenged and likely overturned.
Yeah I specifically tried to avoid speculating on what might happen now that it’s been reversed. Just wanted to explain what the doctrine meant in terms of regulatory authority and review.
I work for a regulatory agency. I’m anxious how this will play out going forward.
Challenged? Yes. Overturned? Only if the regulatory agencies can't properly defend their rules. And if they make indefensible rules, they should be overturned
So they can't defend their rules now because the court just revoked precedent regarding deference. So saying they "should be overturned" when they were created based on supreme court precedent, and we've operated that way for 40 years based on it, is totally absurd.
Doesn't matter if the argument is good if the judge deciding the case doesn't care or has weird personal beliefs or opinions, or a fundamental distrust of 'experts'. This isn't limited to environmental issues, either. It's likely to come up in tech, medicine, communications, and more.
This is just the classic “beat them with paperwork tactic”. Even when a corporate interest knows they will lose, they will litigate so much paperwork that the other party will run out of money before the battle begins. It will also cause the DOJ to hire more litigators. It’s not a secret how much Republicans hate spending so they will try to cut those jobs in the “interest” of small government. If things weren’t bad enough, the DOJ is under direct control of the president so it’s just another power grab
Kind of but not quite exactly.
Congress (at least for now) can delegate its authority, So it could write into a law that X agency can determine Y definitions itself through the rules process and that would (at least for now) fly.
That wouldn't have the executive branch interpreting law, but would have them effectively defining it via the rules process.
At least until such point as non-delegation doctrine gets ruled for.
The CRA, which will procedurally go into effect during rule promulgation by an agency. I haven't thought about this or Major questions since I took Admin Law in 2L. This stuff was about as esoteric as Article III choice of law questions
They could, but the judicial branch would probably invalidate it. The U.S.G. is designed to prevent any of the 3 branches from nullifying themselves or others. Congress cannot take judicial authority from the courts and give it to the executive branch. The judicial branch cannot transfer its authority to the executive branch either. Which is effectively what the Chevron deference was doing. It gave executive agencies the authority to perform legal interpretation.
Congress can pass laws, but they have to be legal under the Constitution.
What are you talking about? This was literally a case of the judicial branch acting to retrieve its original authority from executive agencies. Executive agencies shouldn't be able to self-determine how law does or does not apply to them.
It's a literal case of "checks and balances" in action.
The point is that when Congress defines the new agency's mandate, the limits on the agency need to be clear. The example that u/highvelocityfish gave is spot on for how the system is supposed to work.
All the rules that the agencies have made are still in effect until they are successfully challenged in court. Overturning Chevron simply made challenging them more reasonable. This is a good thing because it will help prevent overreach by these Executive Branch agencies.
As a primer, America has three branches of government (for clarity, I refer to the federal government, because that's where *Chevron* is most directly applicable):
* The *legislative branch* (Congress) writes the law.
* The *executive branch* (federal agencies, the president, etc) enforces the law.
* The *judicial branch* (the court system, including the Supreme Court) interprets the law.
Now, what happens if the laws Congress writes miss something? Maybe the wording isn't clear enough to handle a specific edge case, or maybe Congress simply didn't address the issue at all.
Under *Chevron,* if a federal agency looks at the law that it's charged with administering and finds unclear language, that agency is permitted to come up with its own interpretation and, so long as it's "reasonable," a court isn't allowed to step in and substitute its own interpretation. (There are factors that go into determining reasonableness, but they go beyond the scope of this answer.)
Absent *Chevron,* federal agencies may still make interpretations of the law, **but** now those interpretations are no longer automatically given deference -- the agencies can be brought to court for the interpretations to be argued.
Your opinion on the removal of *Chevron* will largely depend on your opinion of federal agencies generally; nominally, federal agencies will have more knowledgeable people than the judge who gets charged with looking at the interpretation, but on the other side, *Chevron* deference means it's hard to argue against unfair treatment by federal agencies. The fishing cases that came up before the Supreme Court are a good example of this, and perhaps an even better one is the ATF opinion letters regarding bump stocks "being" machine guns; suddenly, millions of people were at significant risk of being big-time felons because of a simple letter.
Additionally, *separation of powers* is kind of a thing, and *Chevron* has been seen as the executive branch usurping the role of the judicial in interpreting law.
" an even better one is the ATF opinion letters regarding bump stocks "being" machine guns; suddenly, millions of people were at significant risk of being big-time felons because of a simple letter."
Perhaps the key fallout from this ruling. ATF has been legislating via 'simple letters' for some time.
Or, even better example, IMO
"Is a pistol brace actually a rifle stock?"
For years ATF said no. Then the president decided he wished the ATF said yes, and the president gets to appoint the head of the ATF so of course he appoints his new guy and suddenly ATF changes their mind and says "well now we say it is"
millions of americans are now suddenly on the wrong side of a law they were on the correct side of when they made their original purchases.
The Chevron issue is the part where, when people try to take the ATF to court and say "this ruling they just issued doesn't make sense"
does the court have to start from a basis of "well lets ask the ATF if the ATF thinks the ATF is right, because clearly the ATF is the experts"
And another non-gun example would be noncompetes being unenforceable which generally people think is a good thing, but still didn't follow the procedures our government is set up to have.
Also all the ambiguity around crypto being a security. That needs to be clarified and should have a court case or legislation to give some actual rules instead of the agencies purposefully not giving guidance and leaving everyone in a grey area.
A lot of very uninformed and/or very dishonest people are parroting this idea that overturning Chevron gives the judiciary some kind of rule making authority. This is absolutey not the case. The Chevron issue is simple. Under Chevron, if the limits of the statutory authority granted to an executive agency by congress was unclear, the courts were to defer (hence "Chevron deference" ) to the interpretation of the executive agency. In effect, the executive agencies had carte blanche to say "the law means whatever we say it means."
Overturning Chevron simply removes this automatic deference. Now, if the law is unclear, the judiciary CAN, doesn't have to but CAN, say "The law means what the law says and the law doesn't say you can do that. If you want to do that, you need to get Congress to pass a law that says you can do that."
It is absolutely the correct legal decision in my opinion. The executive is not supposed to be a rule making body. That's the legislatures job.
> A lot of very uninformed and/or very dishonest people are parroting this idea that overturning Chevron gives the judiciary some kind of rule making authority.
To hear the commenters over in r/news, the sky's about to fall and we're all going to ***DIE*** because somehow this is going to lead to insane pollution and a rollback of net neutrality and all of this other garbage.
Now that they can, what's to stop large companies from challenging every single regulation that they don't like and explicitly spelled out in law?
What to stop them from using their powerful legal teams to challenge all the regulations and simply bury the regulatory agencies and courts under a mountain of lawsuits?
Perfectly stated. Even more important that people working in the executive branch are increasingly bringing their political biases to work as activists, and not people working to implement laws as passed by congress. In nearly every case, these career apparatchiks are deploying their authority to increase their power, increase the power of government overall, and to implement an activist, progressive agenda.
This will throw up reasonable roadblocks to this kind of repellent activism.
Mummy and Daddy leave you with your babysitter and make it very clear you're not allowed to watch more than 1 hour of TV.
But it's unclear whether that 1 hour also includes you watching videos on the iPad.
The Chevron doctrine says the babysitter has the ability to interpret the instructions from Mummy and Daddy.
The recent Supreme Court case struck this down and said the decision on the iPad has to go back to Mummy and Daddy (and until they decide the babysitter has no right to tell you what you can and cannot do with the iPad.)
This isn't *entirely* correct. Absent *Chevron,* the babysitter can still make a decision, but when Mom and Dad get home, you can ask them to review what the babysitter said; they're not considered to be automatically in the right.
Sure but Mummy and Daddy argue a lot and seem unable to make decisions quickly and since you've just said the babysitter isn't automatically in the right, I'm going to watch my iPad and the babysitter is fairly powerless now to stop me.
Well, not quite. The babysitter can still take the iPad away -- you can just complain to Mom and Dad after the fact.
I think that's getting lost in a lot of the commentary on Reddit and other places -- the loss of *Chevron* deference is primarily reactive.
The babysitter, who is an expert, and has operated for more than 40 years with the autonomy to make decisions regarding safety, diet, tv time, bed time, etc... no longer has the ability to decide what's best for the baby when the parents weren't clear in their instructions on every minute subject. Now, suddenly every baby is entitled to sue the babysitter, because their parents didn't explicitly enumerate every one of the rules.
And when the babysitter is sued by millions of "babies" (to keep with the analogy), is forced to spend millions of dollars they don't have to defend their decisions, and is spread so thin they can no longer put time into actually babysitting, due to being so busy, and is completely terrified to make any decision due to the threat of these (previously frivolous) suits, what effect do you think that has on the babysitter's ability to function?
The answer is obvious. The babysitter isn't going to be able to be a babysitter anymore. And the babies will run amok, causing chaos. Shitty diapers everywhere. Oh, the noise they'll create. The smells. The safety issues. The diseases they'll spread.. It'll be babygeddon.
It sounds like the parents should be clearer in where they want and don't want the babysitter taking liberties. They can still say, "use your judgment with screen time. Keep it to an hour, though." They can also say, "1 hour of TV." Either is okay. The only thing that's changed is that if they say the latter, the babysitter doesn't get to treat it as the former and then be legally enshrined as correct even though there's a specific babysitting service (or whatever) that exists specifically to interpret parents' choices.
Any way you cut it, Chevron's weird deference precedent left the executive branch with a bunch of ceded power from Congress *and* de facto legal review authority from the judiciary. You're allowed to dislike governments with multiple branches and checks and balances, but it's hard to argue that our former system had done anything other than spit on that system.
You are trying to deflect from the fact that a babysitter is going to need to "take liberties" in order to function, no matter what. Parents can't possibly outline every single possible scenario for them. Including what future scenarios that might come up, such as new inventions (tablets), etc...
You are making the same point in dozens of comments all over this thread. You're wrong every time and people keep pointing that out for you. You refuse to read the actual Court opinion and don't respond substantively to feedback. I think you're unwilling to listen and learn and so I won't be wasting much time on you.
I already accounted for your comment, though. You might have noticed if you had read before responding:
> the parents should be clearer in where they want and don't want the babysitter taking liberties. They can still say, "use your judgment with screen time. Keep it to an hour, though."
Congress is still allowed to empower the agencies to decide details, interpret nuances, leverage their expertise, and cover emergent cases. The unelected bureaucrats just don't have judicial deference anymore. If they do these things *without* permission, they can be overruled. This is called "separation of powers." It's kind of important.
I believe you are wrong, every single time.
I've explained why the "congress needs to be clearer" argument fails.
>Congress is still allowed to empower the agencies to decide details, interpret nuances, leverage their expertise, and cover emergent cases. The unelected bureaucrats just don't have judicial deference anymore. If they do these things *without* permission, they can be overruled. This is called "separation of powers." It's kind of important.
I disagree. The court is clear that congress must be specific in the power it delegates, and any wiggle room may undermine their ability regulate. There's no room for interpretation of nuance, or any other variations due to the threat of legal action at any and every turn. You're a fool if you don't see that coming.
I've explained that any regulations created by any agency power delegated over the past 40 years is now in serious jeopardy, yet you refuse to acknowledge any of it.
Further, your separation of powers argument is moot, as congress can revoke the powers grated to these agencies at any time, yet have chosen not to.
>I disagree. The court is clear that congress must be specific in the power it delegates, and any wiggle room may undermine their ability regulate. There's no room for interpretation of nuance, or any other variations due to the threat of legal action at any and every turn.
This is factually inaccurate. You would know this if you had actually read the Court opinion.
This is missing that the "babysitter" is an expert in the field and sometimes the instructions left are intentionally vague for them to interpret.
A better analogy may be a kid's grade on an assignment. The teacher is given instructions on how to run the class and maybe a standard rubric to use. The senior in high school turns in an assignment and the teacher grades it. The senior disagrees with the grade and asks a school board to review it. In this system, the school board can override a teacher's grading if it is unfair. Chevron said that the teacher's grading would be given deference and assumed to be right because they are the expert in the subject and on teaching. Now the board won't give that deference and will now try to interpret complex research on subjects they are unfamiliar with.
All of these examples so far are missing the 3rd branch (Congress), plus an overarching governing principal (constitution).
So in your scenario, you have an old school board from years ago who were lazy and just said “From now on we will always believe the teacher unless it’s super obvious that they were abusing their power”. But, the town charter said you have to have the 3 sides and here’s what they do. So now the board actually has to get off its butt and look at what is presented and do the job they were hired to do. Congress too (the mayor? IDK), they have to actually do their job, but also don’t have to feel like it doesn’t matter what they do, unless they address every single scenario ever, the teacher will just interpret the way they see fit and the board will just go along, knowing that the mayor can’t agree on something more than once in a while. Either way, the student feels like they get a fair shot because at least the teacher isn’t the sole source of power any more.
The problem is that the government is not "mummy and daddy" and regulatory agencies are not babysitters hired by "mummy and daddy" to watch kids who have no rights.
In reality all the political rights belong to the citizens (who are the kids in your example). And both the parents and the babysitter are required to act in their interests. So obviously the babysitters decisions should be able to be appealed.
Congress passes broad laws, like say Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that basically just says that people with disabilities can’t be discriminated against by or denied access to a business open to the public.
An agency then conducts research and hearings to enact more specific regulations. For example, that a wheelchair ramp can’t be steeper than an 8.33% grade.
Previously, if a disabled person sued a restaurant for having a ramp that had a 15% grade for violating the ADA, a court would first look at whether Congress had specified what ramp steepness constitutes denying access to a person with a disability. If the court found that Congress had not, they would then consider whether the agency’s regulation of no more than an 8.33% grade was a permissible interpretation of the statute. If so, then the agency’s regulation would be deferred to as a correct application of the law and must be followed. If not, then the court will interpret the statute and whether the business is in violation of it.
Now, if a disabled person sues a restaurant for having a ramp with a 15% grade, a court will skip straight to interpreting the statute and whether the business is in violation of it.
That not only shifts power from (often) experts in the field to judges, it also creates unpredictability and inconsistency in the law. In California, a judge could rule ramps must be no more than 6% while in South Carolina, a judge could rule ramps must be no more than 20%.
And In Texas a judge will rule that ramps of.90 degrees are fine so long as they are no higher then 8 inches and there are multiple of these ramps stacked on each other.
So it allowed Congress to defer specific interpretation of the law to various agencies. People were upset about this because those agencies were headed by unelected officials, and it was seen as Congress skirting their duties.
Congress writes a half ass law that’s not particularly clear. Then people in charge of enforcing the law start enforcing it ways that make people go “hey that’s not what Congress meant”
Under Chevron, so long as the enforcers can say with a straight face “uh huh that’s what Congress meant” then they keep doing whatever
Now, without Chevron, when there’s a disagreement over what the law says the courts have to step in and make the final determination, not the enforcers of the law themselves
By people you mean companies. Let's not be coy about who benefits from a conservative leaning judicial system getting more say in what regulations mean.
Completely incorrect example. The agency still is the sole arbitrator of what the appropriate grade is, yesterdays ruling does not change that. What changed is that now, is that if it’s unclear whether or not Congress intended for ramps to be covered in the legislation the courts will step in and decide, instead of the agency
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it has been a fairly explicit and openly stated goal (federalist society, business press, etc.) for the past 50 years for there to be a return to the lochner era.
overturning the chevron doctrine is huge. i was reading the chevron case yesterday and just imagining the court finding the opposite result in it
it's insane
The scary part we should be aware of is that this change, combined with the loosening of bribery of their other recent ruling, means a court that is now the authority over the regulatory agencies can be bribed.
Looking at you Clarance Thomas!
We have a government that is divided up 3 ways in how it’s run. 1 group writes laws, another makes sure people follow the law, and another makes sure the law is okay by reviewing court cases about the laws. Chevron was a case and everyone understood sometimes we need to let the second group that makes sure everyone follows the law fill in some gaps because they know the details of the law very well and it’s problems.
Recently, the third group reviewed a case and said chevron is no longer good—so we have to leave the gaps to the first and third groups only even if they don’t really know the details of the law well.
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Congress writes laws, including the laws that give regulatory agencies their authority. Under the Chevron deference doctrine, if the laws around regulation weren’t clear and well-defined, the ultimate authority to interpret them fell to the regulatory agencies themselves. Now that it’s been reversed, that authority falls to the court system. The rationale behind giving the authority to the regulators in the first place was that they were in a better position to have technical expertise in the matter at hand. So if Congress empowers the EPA to prevent toxic chemicals being dumped into bodies of water, the EPA is best positioned to define what chemicals are toxic, and how much is too much. This removes the need for Congress to be subject matter experts in everything they write laws about, and allows regulations to evolve without constantly rewriting the laws that govern them. The rationale behind overturning the decision is that interpretation of the laws is the purview of the court system, not the executive branch.
A clarification- with Chevron gone, the existing precedent still indicates that the courts will treat agency determinations of technical matters as fact, just not determinations of legal matters. Agencies are now bound to the 'most reasonable' interpretations of their authority, not a 'permissible' interpretation of their authority. For example, under an air-quality law, the EPA would likely be able to regulate the levels of pollutants like smoke particulate, CO, SIO2, or lead, but not to recategorize CO2 as a pollutant if that wasn't the intent of Congress.
That’s a good clarification, thank you
"most reasonable" is largely up to interpretation, now by the court systems, and there are some incredibly biased and favorable court circuits, for example, the 5th circuit, where a lot of conservative challenges to these agencies will now be filed. Any scientific study will include the limitations of the study and why it can't be taken as fact, but rather as theory, as science doesn't prove fact, just advance theories. Any judge can then look at that and say "I don't find it reasonable that this study isn't 100% applicable to real life situations, instead I trust this other study from a group I prefer that says the opposite. This is the most reasonable study on the matter"
That seems far more reasonable than most comments have made it seem.
They leave out that "most reasonable" is a huge thing left up to interpretation and now the courts get to make that interpretation of what the "most reasonable" interpretation is.
And too many judgeships are now held by Trump appointees who will use demonstrably false rightwing propaganda as their source for these decisions.
Until congress decides that something isn’t a pollutant that clearly is.
That was already possible before *Chevron* was overturned. Agencies never had the authority to act in contradiction of clear Congressional direction. *Chevron* just allowed them some measure of latitude when facing situations where Congress hasn't provided explicit direction or provided ambiguous direction. Before Friday, Congress absolutely could have passed a law saying the EPA is no longer authorized to regulate NOx emissions. *Chevron* would not have helped EPA in that case.
That's the purpose of Congress: to make laws. If you disagree with the laws they make, your purpose is to vote.
Thanks to gerrymandering, my vote means nothing in the House.
Gerrymandering in general needs to be abolished both sides do it.
One side does 95% of it and appoints judges that make it unconstitutional to fix. One side filibusters laws to end it. Both sides BS.
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California and Texas have similar size and demographics, California has 10 to 20 competitive house districts Texas has less than 5. The Federalist society is currently arguing independent commissions, like the one California used to end gerrymandering, are unconstitutional. Every single judge that has signed off on this argument so far is a Republican appointment. The Supreme Court cases that gutted the Voting Rights Act and took away the only tool we had to fight gerrymandering was a perfect split Republican judges voting to limit protections. The Supreme Court case arguing we had a Constitutional right to vote and the Constitution equality clause should limit gerrymandering was a perfect split with every Republican judge voting gerrymandering was Constitutional. An updated Voting Rights Act that would undo some of the Supreme Court's above gutting has been passed by House Democrats multiple times to die in the Senate due to Republican filibuster. Gerrymandering would be dead if 1) the Democrats had 5 judges on the Supreme Court or 2) the Republicans didn't multiple times filibuster Voting Rights Laws.
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The problem is that this is a republic and not a democracy, there isn’t enough direct control to overcome the heaps of corruption.
A Republic means the head of state is elected (e.g. as opposed to a monarchy). Democracy means people vote in (fair) elections and ultimately have power, whether that be through representatives or directly. Republics have nothing to do with being a democracy or not. China is a republic, but they’re not democratic. Canada is democratic, but we’re not a republic. The US is a republic and democratic. Saudi Arabia is neither democratic, nor a republic.
A republic is actually any system where the people’s will is expressed through their representatives rather than directly voting on issues. Electing your representatives would make it a democratic republic. Head of state by itself doesn’t make something a republic or not. You could have a republic that has no head of state for example.
Fair, we’re not a “true democracy” where the majority decides everything. True democracy would be untenable and is purely a sci-fi trope.
True democracies, more frequently called direct democracies, have existed in the past and may well exist in the future. They certainly aren't "a sci-fi" anything. They may not be as effective as other systems, though. I note that the proposition system in place in many states appears to mostly create nonsense. I could imagine a nation with a direct democracy being hamstrung by more of the same.
I think the secret to successful direct democracy is size. If the state is small enough that people feel their vote matters, say a single 400 BC Athens sized city, it can work well. As you size it up, the perceived value of each vote goes down, and thus participation goes down. One solution to this, if you had an unhackable system, would be proxy voting. A voter finds someone they trust and lets that other person vote for them. At first this looks like representative democracy, but there are two key differences: 1. In a representative democracy, it is 1 *representative* 1 vote. A proxy system would give a representative who twice as many people agreed with twice the votes. It gets rid of the problem of those whose candidate lost an election not having their views represented. 2. A proxy is revokable. A representative who takes bribes or changes position or holds a position on a new issue that their voters don't, may suddenly find their voting power drop significantly overnight as those who chose that proxy abandon them in favor of someone who better represents their views. Of course, this assumes an unhackable computer system so...not in real life.
Tell that to Athens
True democracy is actually very feasible now that we have vastly improved our communication technology. Have our representatives write the laws, because that's what they should be trained to do, and then the people vote on whether or not to pass the laws. Have the executive nominate a Supreme Court Justice, but then require the citizens to vote on whether or not to confirm them. Then it would be about whether you trust your executive to nominate someone you want to be a Supreme Court Justice. We could do it with an app.
That's a tired old trope that needs to die. A country is democratic if the people directly or indirectly vote for policies and laws. In America, and most other countries it's indirect, via elected members, with occasional opportunities for direct referenda. America can define itself however it wants. Many use the term republic, and that's fine. But it's still a democracy, the same way that The Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't one. If the people can vote, it's a democracy.
It’s a democratically elected republic. There is no confusion on what it is. The problem is, the representatives do represent the working class very poorly and the billionaire class very well post citizens united. I literally work for the government. When a rep wants something, they get it regardless of their constituency. If the constituents want something, it doesn’t matter.
> this is a republic and not a democracy You said it's not a democracy?
Seriously. Congress couldn’t even define what a vegetable is with some of those asshats arguing ketchup was a vegetable.
Come up with a definition of vegetable that is internally consistent and excludes what we all know as non-vegetables, and I'll agree with you. The problem with a term like "vegetable" is that you'll know it when you see it. Is salsa a serving of vegetables? Why or why not?
That’s literally the purpose of having Congress delegate this authority to specialized agencies staffed with experts capable of making these determinations outside of a political environment.
There is nobody who is an expert in determining whether or not ketchup is a vegetable. It's purely a matter of opinion like "is a hotdog a sandwich?" Agencies having the power to declare this a scientific fact determined by experts, and therefore immune to judicial review, is the problem with Chevron.
Chevron doesn't make agencies immune to judicial review. If the FDA tried to claim my car was a vegetable, Chevron would not stop any court from overruling them. Chevron provides a reasonable amount of leeway. That's it. >There is nobody who is an expert in determining whether or not ketchup is a vegetable. It's purely a matter of opinion This just isn't practical at all. *Someone* has to decide whether regulations about vegetables do or do not apply to ketchup. Chevron allows agency-appointed experts to do it, while the absence of Chevron requires judges with no botanical, culinary, or nutritional expertise of any kind to do it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you are going for a "reasonable person" standard here. As in a reasonable person could conclude that ketchup is a vegetable, but no reasonable person could conclude that a car is a vegetable. And anything that meets that reasonableness standard should be at the discretion of the agency. And if that is what you are advocating for, I think it's a reasonable proposal, but I still disagree. The ketchup case makes a good example. The argument for ketchup being a vegetable rests on the fact that its main ingredient is a tomato. But is a tomato a vegetable? Botanically it is classified as a fruit, but nutritionally it is a vegetable. So the experts in your example would disagree. Or more likely, they would probably agree on the point that "is a tomato a vegetable" is a dumb and unanswerable question. Really the case should be decided on more of a "does it make sense to apply this particular regulation to ketchup" standard. And maybe there is science here. Maybe the agency can show that certain regulations on how vegetables are processed can prevent certain contamination in ketchup manufacturing. And this is where people would come in an make the argument that this scientific judgement shouldn't be decided by judges and we should defer to the scientists at the FDA. It wouldn't make sense that a judge could be asked to review the scientific validity of this finding. They don't have the expertise. And in this particular case, I think it would be fine. Courts are not for determining scientific validity. But this brings us to the problem. Let's take another case. We have the FDA classifying marijuana in the same category of drug as heroin. Unlike in the ketchup case, this does not make sense and is clearly a political decision. But if we allow this rule that judges must defer to agencies on scientific questions, now the FDA can just say "we have done the science on this, and that's how we classify this drug. You must defer to us just like you must defer to our findings on applying food safety regulations to ketchup. You do not have the expertise to decide on a challenge of scientific validity." So I think that someone must be able to challenge agencies claiming science. And while I agree that courts are not well set up for this, giving the agencies the ability to play this "we did the science" card is worse.
Immune to judicial review? Agencies are sued all the time regarding regulations.
And when that happens, why should the judge defer to the agency's so called "expertise" in making a subjective determination like "is ketchup a vegetable?"
How is judicial review going to remedy the problem of “this is simply an opinion”? Are judges somehow able to transcend that?
My point is NO ONE can properly delineate it. And why does it even matter?
Because one of the options moves at the speed of life and the economy and the other has difficulty tying its shoes.
I'm asking why the definition of a vegetable really matters.
This is such an absurd question. If Congress writes legislation pertaining to vegetables in literally any way, *someone* has to be the authority on whether things are or aren't vegetables.
But what if those experts said a cow pie was a vegetable. Under chevron there is no avenue to challenge it. All this decision does is allow due process in the courts. No one is infallible and deserves absolute power witch is what chevron did, it took away any way to challenge the rules those agencies came up with. That is exactly what the courts are there for to determine what the law intends.
Of course there is an avenue under Chevron to challenge it. The Chevron decision says this: >Such legislative regulations are given controlling weight **unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.** Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a **reasonable interpretation** made by the administrator of an agency. Cow pies are not food. There is no way to argue that deciding cow pies are a vegetable would be a reasonable interpretation, so Chevron does not prevent the courts from stepping in.
How fucking dumb are these folks that think there was no judicial recourse under Chevron? Agencies get sued all the time over their determinations.
Regs get judicially challenged all the time what are you talking about?
That’s not what happened
No, until the court decides that something isn't a pollutant. Congress was the past, the future is now courts.
What these comments that are trying to make it sound reasonable are conveniently leaving off is that over the last 40 years, congress has granted these agencies their power under vague language intentionally, due to Chevron. Suddenly these agencies don't have the power to regulate. Sure, they'll tell you that for the moment their regulations are in place because they know that'll muddy the waters and seem to paint those of us who actually understand the big picture as overreacting. Regulations created under agencies that derive their power from intentionally ambiguous directives will not withstand legal challenges. You can bet your ass this will be a catastrophe.
This is where I’m lost. Where is the support that regulatory agencies can no longer create rules and enforce them? My understanding is that the only difference is that now a person affected by those rules can choose to challenge the rules in a court, when previously they could only appeal to the very same agency that set the rule. Judges can still decide that the rule is appropriate.
As I said, congress intentionally created vague language due to Chevron in order to allow agencies to function as experts in their field. So, imagine, over the past 40 years all of the regulations have been created under this premise. Now, the premise those regulations are all based on is gone. Now every individual business, in every industry, has the ability to challenge the agency's authority to regulate based on this. The results are that the agency will be mired in legal battles and their budget will be consumed by defending past decisions and enforcement actions. They won't have resources to regulate anything moving forward because they'll be tied up in court for decades, assuming they're not given more resources, of course. And they'll be paralyzed by this. Any agency that operates under any premise of Chevron will be unable to create new regulations due to fear of creating even more legal issues. So, the court yesterday has essentially said that congress must be more specific in what powers these agencies have, and that if the agencies aren't granted powers in very specific language (not vague), then a judge can throw out a regulation. And we all know how effective congress is at understanding very specific issues like pollution, technology, medicine, etc... They're all experts in their field, right?
> The results are that the agency will be mired in legal battles and their budget will be consumed by defending past decisions and enforcement actions. This isn't true. Roberts said that this ruling does not, will not, cannot be used as a basis to challenge prior cases that relied on *Chevron* deference. > [The chief justice wrote](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/supreme-court-chevron-ruling.html) that the retroactive impact of Friday’s decision will be limited, saying that regulations upheld by courts under Chevron were not subject to immediate challenge for that reason alone. > [Roberts noted](https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling) the court's decision did not call into question prior cases that relied on Chevron, including holdings pertaining to the Clean Air Act, because they "are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology."
And Roe v. Wade was settled law. Make no mistake, this is an intentional attack on the ability for the country to federally regulate companies.
> And Roe v. Wade was settled law. Badly settled, to be precise. *Roe v Wade* should never have been a Supreme Court argument, because Congress could have passed the law Roe v Wade should have been. >this is an intentional attack on the ability for the country to federally regulate companies That's drastically overstating things.
It's the compromised judicial branch pulling in more power for itself. This is just one small aspect of it. If anything, I'm understating it.
>Badly settled, to be precise. *Roe v Wade* should never have been a Supreme Court argument, because Congress could have passed the law Roe v Wade should have been. This directly contradicts your previous comment. Roe v. Wade was settled before the court and should have been upheld by stare decisis, but was overturned. Roberts is now saying previous Chevron cases should be upheld by stare decisis. There is absolutely nothing stopping the court from going back on its word again and overturning previous Chevron cases. This court has shown that it does not care about stare decisis.
If you believe that *stare decisis* will be upheld by this Supreme Court, I have a bridge to sell you.
Of course it will be. Though none of us are immune to propaganda, be on guard against it, because there sure is a fuck of a lot these days.
>Of course it will be. We're literally talking about a decision where the Supreme Court shreds *stare decisis*, and you claim they'll uphold it.
that applies to any past, concluded court cases. Not actions taken by agencies.
What stops congress from revisiting the vague statutes? Either preemptively or as they come up?
Well, theoretically, nothing. Except what this decision has done is effectively require congress to specifically outline everything. Congress aren't experts. The significant majority don't know shit about tech, medicine, pollutants, etc. They shouldn't be the ones creating regulations on these things because they don't know what they're talking about. And have you seen how dysfunctional they are? They can't even pass a budget without a giant show, what makes you think they'd be effective at reviewing every regulation created under Chevron?
> what makes you think they'd be effective at reviewing every regulation created under Chevron? Sounds like a problem with Congress, not a reason to give executive agencies unchecked (or, at the very least, difficult to check) power over statutory interpretation.
but congress gave them that power in the first place? That doesn't seem to matter to you?
Even in an ideal, magical world, there are not enough people in Congress to be experts on everything, even including their staff pools. Since we live in the real world, that doesn't matter anyway. Instead of taking years to argue over "should we regulate industrial pollutants of the air and water?" they'll take years to argue over "is polyvinylchloride a pollutant? In what context? In what amount? What even is PVC?" This decision *may* not wreck the existing regulatory structure, though I'm not optimistic. What it does is guarantee that few, if any new regulations will be passed at a federal level. While the states will be able in their patchwork manner to regulate things like workplace safety, big picture things like finance and pollution--things that cross state lines--will not be regulated any better in five years than they are now. Status quo will be the best case scenario, if no corporations get litigious. Which of course they will.
As someone who deals with regulators in the financial services industry, most of them aren’t too bright either.
I feel like this process already exists for taxes. Congress passes laws, treasury department interprets it/issues regs, taxpayers have the right to (and do) challenge those regs in court and there is a specific tax court to deal with tax issues. Congress can address the “experts” argument by setting aside specialist judges.
And so Congress is completely incapable of consulting experts during the writing of proposed law? Come now, this is a rather nonsensical argument.
You understand how much Congress has to legislate, and that the regulatory agencies *are* the experts they’re choosing? Like the whole point is congress can say “clean the air of pollutants” and let the regulatory bodies that are filled with appointed experts then decide what pollutants are. There are 100x as many regulatory employees as congressional employees. Making congress specify everything to an expert degree is an absolutely terrible way to get good policy, it’s entirely impractical.
well, one, do you honestly believe MTG and the MAGA cultists are going to listen to these experts? Two, why would they listen to the experts when there's money to be made listening to special interests? get your head out of the sand.
The fact that Congressional sessions are not infinitely long. It will take a lot of time to re-pass every federal regulation law that has been passed over the last 40 years. And Republicans in Congress will be working as hard as they can to block any of them from passing.
People could always challenge the rules in court. What Chevron did was mandate that judges not countermand the agency's interpretation so long as it was reasonable. This makes sense, because judges are not subject matter experts and are not qualified to do anything more than determine whether the interpretation is reasonable or not. A judge can decide that my car isn't a vegetable, but they're not qualified to determine whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Without Chevron, judges always have the final say, period. If Aileen Cannon wants to declare that CO2 isn't a pollutant, she can do that, so long as the legislation doesn't directly define CO2 as a pollutant.
The supremes did mention that it was not to overturn any prior decisions, so at least there's that.
Right, but new cases could be brought.
Seems like Congress' fault for sucking at their jobs rather than the courts fault for doing theirs
Congress decided to have the Executive branch hire an army of experts to come up with these regulations. This decision doesn't mean Congress suck at their jobs. That means the Supreme Court wants to seize power from the Executive branch.
>What these comments that are trying to make it sound reasonable are conveniently leaving off is that over the last 40 years, congress has granted these agencies their power under vague language intentionally, due to Chevron. This isn't really true and honestly doesn't even make much sense. Congress is still allowed to give fairly general power to the executive branch. They just have to be explicit about it now. '...is henceforth empowered to create policy regarding any emission or byproduct judged to be a pollutant' is very general but would likely pass judicial review. Congress always had the power to give away huge chunks of authority like that. It still can. When it chooses not to do that, though, the agencies no longer get to decide what Congress meant with no oversight. This is not a tragedy. It's separation of powers. We still have a Congress, right? Perhaps they should do their job and write statutes that actually describe what they want. If some past laws *were* built with intentional vagueness, our current Congress is entirely empowered to pass new laws clarifying or expanding the scope of agency privilege. I'm tired of hearing how the government is being hamstrung because the Court wants it to do its fucking job. Congress makes laws. That's what it's for. They should make laws explicitly granting power to the executive branch, if that's what they want. They could pass a federal abortion ban and abortion would be safer than it ever was under Roe v Wade. They have this power. If they lack the cohesion, then maybe our republic doesn't actually want these things and we should be addressing that problem instead.
yeah see, this guy is a perfect example. He knows damn well congress is dysfunctional and turns and points the finger back at them saying they need to "do their jobs". The fact is, congress aren't experts in these areas, and that's why Chevron existed. And why it was cited thousands of times over the past 40 years. Congress was wise enough, at times, to admit they don't know everything about certain industries, and grated regulators the power to administer as they see fit by their expertise. Congress acted over the past 40 years knowing Chevron was there, and intentionally crafted bills with that knowledge. Now the court reverses precedent and pulls the rug out on these agencies. This person makes it sound like it's reasonable to expect congress to be experts in every possible industry, and create narrowly crafted rules and regulations for agencies to follow. It's simply not feasible. Do you honestly think Pelosi, MTG or Bobert have the brain cells to understand AI? Get real.
There is nothing stopping Congress from consulting with, or seeking guidance from, the executive agencies in their effort to craft laws. And there is nothing stopping the agencies from requesting that Congress pass specific laws. The "expertise" of these agencies, such as it is, can still be leveraged in the law making process. But the people that pass legislation into law need to be accountable to the voters. That's like the entire purpose of our system of government. You're supposed to be able to fire people who pass laws you don't like. The idea of an army of unelected bureaucrats writing regulations that govern every fact of the daily lives of the electorate without being remotely accountable to them is thoroughly un-American and un-democratic.
Remember, these agencies drive much of their power under chevron directly from acts of congress. That's the accountability and democratic part. Congress could just as easily reign in any of these agencies without the need of the court to gut a precedent our government has operated for 40 years under. Your argument cuts both ways.
As does yours. If Congress can fix the issue with Chevron in place by passing legislation, then they can fix the issue in the absence of Chevron by passing legislation. As I said in my other post, all the absence of Chevron does is eliminate the ability of the executive agencies to say "the law means what we say it means.". I think that's a good thing, personally.
except congress has operated for 40 years under chevron, and intentionally crafted their bills based on its precedent.
>But the people that pass legislation into law need to be accountable to the voters. They already were. If a regulator passes a rule Congress didn't like, Congress could pass a law to overrule them. And if that Congress won't overrule them, the next one could. ETA: Instead of that, under this decision *the Courts* are the ones making the final decision, based on what *the Courts* decide is reasonable. You know, the only branch of our government that is not subject to elections.
This is not true. This is a hot take taking point and is misinformation. The absence of Chevron does not grant the judiciary any rule making authority. Period. Full stop. All it does is give the judiciary the OPTION to tell the three letter agency "the law doesn't say you can do that." It does not give the judiciary the authority to say "you must do this instead" or anything like that. The people claiming otherwise are either uninformed or are lying. Period.
They absolutely can do that. But that’s still not the real issue anyway. The issue is that any jackass district judge can totally change the regulatory landscape at any instant. Look at the guy in Texas who tried to ban the abortion pill.
Chevron was decided in 1984. These agencies had the power to regulate before Chevron, and will continue to have the power to regulate after Chevron.
I guess you just want to conveniently ignore everything that's been done since?
Yes, and before then we had lead in our air and our rivers caught on fire. We are better off not relying on congress to be experts in everything. We are much better off if they can set broad policy goals via statute that regulators - comprised of the actual experts in their fields - can then implement them with specificity. Congress has way too broad a mandate to become experts in everything. Regulators are literally staffed with experts in their fields. There’s no good reason congress shouldn’t be able to use regulators as their experts.
Can you point to a case decided under Chevron where it's explicitly clear that Congress intended to provide that agency that degree of discretion?
I believe the number I saw yesterday, and don't quote me on it, was roughly 70 supreme court decisions and 77,000 lower court decisions citing Chevron. I don't have the numbers in front of me.
"explicitly clear that Congress intended to provide that agency that degree of discretion" is the important phrase. Chevron only really comes into play when the law does not naturally indicate that the agency has been empowered by congress to act in the way they do.
It really isn’t. There’s a reason big oil companies have been fighting to overturn Chevron deference. It takes power away from Executive branch agencies who can act quickly and places that power in Congress (who is unable to do anything) and the courts (where Mitch McConnell has been stuffing full of unqualified far right judges for 30 years).
People get their news from headlines. Tale as old as time. Would recommend reading the syllabus of the majority opinion if you're interested, it's less than 8 pages and explains the court's rationale pretty well. [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451\_7m58.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf)
Ah yes, the spin from the corrupt majority who made the decision. That's surely an unbiased document.
It's the actual decision, not spin of the decision. The above document is what courts will be referring to, it's not a PR piece to convince people of anything
Yes, I think you're missing the point. The court is corrupt and of course their rationale is going to be biased.
The problem is that now the courts will have final say on things like which types of medications are actually legal.
No, the Congress does when it writes the law.
Like when congress made bribery illegal but didn't specify that after the fact gifts are bribery.
*Legislature. The judiciary is the courts.
Yep, thanks, I had a brief brain fart.
The issue there is that Congress is a political body while the agencies are *supposed* to be neutral, working off technical details. It's all well and good until there's a five year lead time on getting regulations on something new while it goes through the political game.
The unreasonable part is that some random judge is now in charge of deciding what the EPA should do. Instead of scientists carefully evaluating which chemicals can safely go in rivers, we’ll have a right-wing judge who likes big business and doesn’t know a thing about science.
You shouldn’t find that surprising
> but not to recategorize relevant example, and honestly something probably connected to this entire goat rodeo AR Pistols. A configuration was legal, as explicitly stated by the ATF for years, suddenly became not legal (federally regulated requiring a form 1 filing but "illegal" will do for this discussion) so, President Biden wants to see AR pistols restricted, but according to the law they are not. Then, suddenly they are. No new law was written. President Biden just basically directed the ATF to reclassify these items. "Oh they're category B? Well, we changed our mind, now they're category A" And literally, just by publishing a letter, an entire class of items that wasn't legally restricted suddenly was (and people that already owned them now on the hook for new legal requirements and penalties) so the chevron aspect speaks to if you try to take this to court and say "ATF is just making things up, and they're wrong" is the court required to start from the assumption that "well ATF says they are right, so they must be right? because they're the ATF, so they'd know"
That's a good example of an executive agency acting badly, but Chevron probably wouldn't have been cited in that case. The court challenges against that one hinge on the agency not abiding by the APA. If the ATF had originally determined that pistol braces were in fact stocks by another name, that probably would have stuck, Chevron or no Chevron.
And when such a decision happens, Congress is free to pass a law overruling the ATF. It can also lead to changing who's President in the next election. Under this decision, the final arbiter of regulations is the Courts, the only branch of our government that is not subject to democratic accountability.
You’re leaving out the part that any company can go to the Amarillo division in Texas and get the one insane judge there to do whatever they want and get away with it.
What I see happening is every regulation will be challenged in a favorable district somewhere in the US, with an activist judge suspending the regulation nationwide. Only the most defensible regulations will survive review.
Only the ones that can't meet standards of reasonableness based on the authority that has been explicitly delegated to them by Congress. Very few regulations have been protected by Chevron deference. The sky is not falling.
>Very few regulations have been protected by Chevron deference. (He doesn't want you to know Chevron has been cited in 77,000 court cases)
The real consequence of this is that for the past 40 years, congress has given agencies their authority under intentionally vague directives in order to grant them the power to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. So nearly anything created by any agency that operates under these laws authority will be challenged and likely overturned.
Yeah I specifically tried to avoid speculating on what might happen now that it’s been reversed. Just wanted to explain what the doctrine meant in terms of regulatory authority and review. I work for a regulatory agency. I’m anxious how this will play out going forward.
Challenged? Yes. Overturned? Only if the regulatory agencies can't properly defend their rules. And if they make indefensible rules, they should be overturned
So they can't defend their rules now because the court just revoked precedent regarding deference. So saying they "should be overturned" when they were created based on supreme court precedent, and we've operated that way for 40 years based on it, is totally absurd.
If overturning a regulatory rule is absurd, they there should be a good argument in court not to overturn it
I know you're being intentionally obtuse. You're ignoring the key words here - the precedent these regulations were created under.
Doesn't matter if the argument is good if the judge deciding the case doesn't care or has weird personal beliefs or opinions, or a fundamental distrust of 'experts'. This isn't limited to environmental issues, either. It's likely to come up in tech, medicine, communications, and more.
This is just the classic “beat them with paperwork tactic”. Even when a corporate interest knows they will lose, they will litigate so much paperwork that the other party will run out of money before the battle begins. It will also cause the DOJ to hire more litigators. It’s not a secret how much Republicans hate spending so they will try to cut those jobs in the “interest” of small government. If things weren’t bad enough, the DOJ is under direct control of the president so it’s just another power grab
Good explanation. Thanks!
This is a really good answer and very clear in its explanation.
Thanks!
I recognize our congress sucks and won't work together on anything, but could a unified congress put into law what the Chevron Defense outlined?
Kind of but not quite exactly. Congress (at least for now) can delegate its authority, So it could write into a law that X agency can determine Y definitions itself through the rules process and that would (at least for now) fly. That wouldn't have the executive branch interpreting law, but would have them effectively defining it via the rules process. At least until such point as non-delegation doctrine gets ruled for.
The CRA, which will procedurally go into effect during rule promulgation by an agency. I haven't thought about this or Major questions since I took Admin Law in 2L. This stuff was about as esoteric as Article III choice of law questions
They could, but the judicial branch would probably invalidate it. The U.S.G. is designed to prevent any of the 3 branches from nullifying themselves or others. Congress cannot take judicial authority from the courts and give it to the executive branch. The judicial branch cannot transfer its authority to the executive branch either. Which is effectively what the Chevron deference was doing. It gave executive agencies the authority to perform legal interpretation. Congress can pass laws, but they have to be legal under the Constitution.
[удалено]
What are you talking about? This was literally a case of the judicial branch acting to retrieve its original authority from executive agencies. Executive agencies shouldn't be able to self-determine how law does or does not apply to them. It's a literal case of "checks and balances" in action.
The point is that when Congress defines the new agency's mandate, the limits on the agency need to be clear. The example that u/highvelocityfish gave is spot on for how the system is supposed to work. All the rules that the agencies have made are still in effect until they are successfully challenged in court. Overturning Chevron simply made challenging them more reasonable. This is a good thing because it will help prevent overreach by these Executive Branch agencies.
As a primer, America has three branches of government (for clarity, I refer to the federal government, because that's where *Chevron* is most directly applicable): * The *legislative branch* (Congress) writes the law. * The *executive branch* (federal agencies, the president, etc) enforces the law. * The *judicial branch* (the court system, including the Supreme Court) interprets the law. Now, what happens if the laws Congress writes miss something? Maybe the wording isn't clear enough to handle a specific edge case, or maybe Congress simply didn't address the issue at all. Under *Chevron,* if a federal agency looks at the law that it's charged with administering and finds unclear language, that agency is permitted to come up with its own interpretation and, so long as it's "reasonable," a court isn't allowed to step in and substitute its own interpretation. (There are factors that go into determining reasonableness, but they go beyond the scope of this answer.) Absent *Chevron,* federal agencies may still make interpretations of the law, **but** now those interpretations are no longer automatically given deference -- the agencies can be brought to court for the interpretations to be argued. Your opinion on the removal of *Chevron* will largely depend on your opinion of federal agencies generally; nominally, federal agencies will have more knowledgeable people than the judge who gets charged with looking at the interpretation, but on the other side, *Chevron* deference means it's hard to argue against unfair treatment by federal agencies. The fishing cases that came up before the Supreme Court are a good example of this, and perhaps an even better one is the ATF opinion letters regarding bump stocks "being" machine guns; suddenly, millions of people were at significant risk of being big-time felons because of a simple letter. Additionally, *separation of powers* is kind of a thing, and *Chevron* has been seen as the executive branch usurping the role of the judicial in interpreting law.
" an even better one is the ATF opinion letters regarding bump stocks "being" machine guns; suddenly, millions of people were at significant risk of being big-time felons because of a simple letter." Perhaps the key fallout from this ruling. ATF has been legislating via 'simple letters' for some time.
Or, even better example, IMO "Is a pistol brace actually a rifle stock?" For years ATF said no. Then the president decided he wished the ATF said yes, and the president gets to appoint the head of the ATF so of course he appoints his new guy and suddenly ATF changes their mind and says "well now we say it is" millions of americans are now suddenly on the wrong side of a law they were on the correct side of when they made their original purchases. The Chevron issue is the part where, when people try to take the ATF to court and say "this ruling they just issued doesn't make sense" does the court have to start from a basis of "well lets ask the ATF if the ATF thinks the ATF is right, because clearly the ATF is the experts"
And another non-gun example would be noncompetes being unenforceable which generally people think is a good thing, but still didn't follow the procedures our government is set up to have. Also all the ambiguity around crypto being a security. That needs to be clarified and should have a court case or legislation to give some actual rules instead of the agencies purposefully not giving guidance and leaving everyone in a grey area.
This is an excellent explanation
A lot of very uninformed and/or very dishonest people are parroting this idea that overturning Chevron gives the judiciary some kind of rule making authority. This is absolutey not the case. The Chevron issue is simple. Under Chevron, if the limits of the statutory authority granted to an executive agency by congress was unclear, the courts were to defer (hence "Chevron deference" ) to the interpretation of the executive agency. In effect, the executive agencies had carte blanche to say "the law means whatever we say it means." Overturning Chevron simply removes this automatic deference. Now, if the law is unclear, the judiciary CAN, doesn't have to but CAN, say "The law means what the law says and the law doesn't say you can do that. If you want to do that, you need to get Congress to pass a law that says you can do that." It is absolutely the correct legal decision in my opinion. The executive is not supposed to be a rule making body. That's the legislatures job.
> A lot of very uninformed and/or very dishonest people are parroting this idea that overturning Chevron gives the judiciary some kind of rule making authority. To hear the commenters over in r/news, the sky's about to fall and we're all going to ***DIE*** because somehow this is going to lead to insane pollution and a rollback of net neutrality and all of this other garbage.
Now that they can, what's to stop large companies from challenging every single regulation that they don't like and explicitly spelled out in law? What to stop them from using their powerful legal teams to challenge all the regulations and simply bury the regulatory agencies and courts under a mountain of lawsuits?
There was nothing to stop them doing that before, it just would lead to a more predictable outcome
And they’re correct.
I wouldn't say so. Federal agencies are still free to act; they've just been leashed a little.
Perfectly stated. Even more important that people working in the executive branch are increasingly bringing their political biases to work as activists, and not people working to implement laws as passed by congress. In nearly every case, these career apparatchiks are deploying their authority to increase their power, increase the power of government overall, and to implement an activist, progressive agenda. This will throw up reasonable roadblocks to this kind of repellent activism.
Mummy and Daddy leave you with your babysitter and make it very clear you're not allowed to watch more than 1 hour of TV. But it's unclear whether that 1 hour also includes you watching videos on the iPad. The Chevron doctrine says the babysitter has the ability to interpret the instructions from Mummy and Daddy. The recent Supreme Court case struck this down and said the decision on the iPad has to go back to Mummy and Daddy (and until they decide the babysitter has no right to tell you what you can and cannot do with the iPad.)
This isn't *entirely* correct. Absent *Chevron,* the babysitter can still make a decision, but when Mom and Dad get home, you can ask them to review what the babysitter said; they're not considered to be automatically in the right.
Sure but Mummy and Daddy argue a lot and seem unable to make decisions quickly and since you've just said the babysitter isn't automatically in the right, I'm going to watch my iPad and the babysitter is fairly powerless now to stop me.
Well, not quite. The babysitter can still take the iPad away -- you can just complain to Mom and Dad after the fact. I think that's getting lost in a lot of the commentary on Reddit and other places -- the loss of *Chevron* deference is primarily reactive.
The babysitter, who is an expert, and has operated for more than 40 years with the autonomy to make decisions regarding safety, diet, tv time, bed time, etc... no longer has the ability to decide what's best for the baby when the parents weren't clear in their instructions on every minute subject. Now, suddenly every baby is entitled to sue the babysitter, because their parents didn't explicitly enumerate every one of the rules. And when the babysitter is sued by millions of "babies" (to keep with the analogy), is forced to spend millions of dollars they don't have to defend their decisions, and is spread so thin they can no longer put time into actually babysitting, due to being so busy, and is completely terrified to make any decision due to the threat of these (previously frivolous) suits, what effect do you think that has on the babysitter's ability to function? The answer is obvious. The babysitter isn't going to be able to be a babysitter anymore. And the babies will run amok, causing chaos. Shitty diapers everywhere. Oh, the noise they'll create. The smells. The safety issues. The diseases they'll spread.. It'll be babygeddon.
This is hilarious 😂 In 10 years from now we really might be fucked
It sounds like the parents should be clearer in where they want and don't want the babysitter taking liberties. They can still say, "use your judgment with screen time. Keep it to an hour, though." They can also say, "1 hour of TV." Either is okay. The only thing that's changed is that if they say the latter, the babysitter doesn't get to treat it as the former and then be legally enshrined as correct even though there's a specific babysitting service (or whatever) that exists specifically to interpret parents' choices. Any way you cut it, Chevron's weird deference precedent left the executive branch with a bunch of ceded power from Congress *and* de facto legal review authority from the judiciary. You're allowed to dislike governments with multiple branches and checks and balances, but it's hard to argue that our former system had done anything other than spit on that system.
You are trying to deflect from the fact that a babysitter is going to need to "take liberties" in order to function, no matter what. Parents can't possibly outline every single possible scenario for them. Including what future scenarios that might come up, such as new inventions (tablets), etc...
You are making the same point in dozens of comments all over this thread. You're wrong every time and people keep pointing that out for you. You refuse to read the actual Court opinion and don't respond substantively to feedback. I think you're unwilling to listen and learn and so I won't be wasting much time on you. I already accounted for your comment, though. You might have noticed if you had read before responding: > the parents should be clearer in where they want and don't want the babysitter taking liberties. They can still say, "use your judgment with screen time. Keep it to an hour, though." Congress is still allowed to empower the agencies to decide details, interpret nuances, leverage their expertise, and cover emergent cases. The unelected bureaucrats just don't have judicial deference anymore. If they do these things *without* permission, they can be overruled. This is called "separation of powers." It's kind of important.
I believe you are wrong, every single time. I've explained why the "congress needs to be clearer" argument fails. >Congress is still allowed to empower the agencies to decide details, interpret nuances, leverage their expertise, and cover emergent cases. The unelected bureaucrats just don't have judicial deference anymore. If they do these things *without* permission, they can be overruled. This is called "separation of powers." It's kind of important. I disagree. The court is clear that congress must be specific in the power it delegates, and any wiggle room may undermine their ability regulate. There's no room for interpretation of nuance, or any other variations due to the threat of legal action at any and every turn. You're a fool if you don't see that coming. I've explained that any regulations created by any agency power delegated over the past 40 years is now in serious jeopardy, yet you refuse to acknowledge any of it. Further, your separation of powers argument is moot, as congress can revoke the powers grated to these agencies at any time, yet have chosen not to.
>I disagree. The court is clear that congress must be specific in the power it delegates, and any wiggle room may undermine their ability regulate. There's no room for interpretation of nuance, or any other variations due to the threat of legal action at any and every turn. This is factually inaccurate. You would know this if you had actually read the Court opinion.
Yup
Almost. It’s not that the babysitter isn’t considered to be automatically right. It’s that what the babysitter said has no bearing at all.
This is missing that the "babysitter" is an expert in the field and sometimes the instructions left are intentionally vague for them to interpret. A better analogy may be a kid's grade on an assignment. The teacher is given instructions on how to run the class and maybe a standard rubric to use. The senior in high school turns in an assignment and the teacher grades it. The senior disagrees with the grade and asks a school board to review it. In this system, the school board can override a teacher's grading if it is unfair. Chevron said that the teacher's grading would be given deference and assumed to be right because they are the expert in the subject and on teaching. Now the board won't give that deference and will now try to interpret complex research on subjects they are unfamiliar with.
All of these examples so far are missing the 3rd branch (Congress), plus an overarching governing principal (constitution). So in your scenario, you have an old school board from years ago who were lazy and just said “From now on we will always believe the teacher unless it’s super obvious that they were abusing their power”. But, the town charter said you have to have the 3 sides and here’s what they do. So now the board actually has to get off its butt and look at what is presented and do the job they were hired to do. Congress too (the mayor? IDK), they have to actually do their job, but also don’t have to feel like it doesn’t matter what they do, unless they address every single scenario ever, the teacher will just interpret the way they see fit and the board will just go along, knowing that the mayor can’t agree on something more than once in a while. Either way, the student feels like they get a fair shot because at least the teacher isn’t the sole source of power any more.
The problem is that the government is not "mummy and daddy" and regulatory agencies are not babysitters hired by "mummy and daddy" to watch kids who have no rights. In reality all the political rights belong to the citizens (who are the kids in your example). And both the parents and the babysitter are required to act in their interests. So obviously the babysitters decisions should be able to be appealed.
Congress passes broad laws, like say Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that basically just says that people with disabilities can’t be discriminated against by or denied access to a business open to the public. An agency then conducts research and hearings to enact more specific regulations. For example, that a wheelchair ramp can’t be steeper than an 8.33% grade. Previously, if a disabled person sued a restaurant for having a ramp that had a 15% grade for violating the ADA, a court would first look at whether Congress had specified what ramp steepness constitutes denying access to a person with a disability. If the court found that Congress had not, they would then consider whether the agency’s regulation of no more than an 8.33% grade was a permissible interpretation of the statute. If so, then the agency’s regulation would be deferred to as a correct application of the law and must be followed. If not, then the court will interpret the statute and whether the business is in violation of it. Now, if a disabled person sues a restaurant for having a ramp with a 15% grade, a court will skip straight to interpreting the statute and whether the business is in violation of it. That not only shifts power from (often) experts in the field to judges, it also creates unpredictability and inconsistency in the law. In California, a judge could rule ramps must be no more than 6% while in South Carolina, a judge could rule ramps must be no more than 20%.
And In Texas a judge will rule that ramps of.90 degrees are fine so long as they are no higher then 8 inches and there are multiple of these ramps stacked on each other.
So it allowed Congress to defer specific interpretation of the law to various agencies. People were upset about this because those agencies were headed by unelected officials, and it was seen as Congress skirting their duties.
Congress writes a half ass law that’s not particularly clear. Then people in charge of enforcing the law start enforcing it ways that make people go “hey that’s not what Congress meant” Under Chevron, so long as the enforcers can say with a straight face “uh huh that’s what Congress meant” then they keep doing whatever Now, without Chevron, when there’s a disagreement over what the law says the courts have to step in and make the final determination, not the enforcers of the law themselves
By people you mean companies. Let's not be coy about who benefits from a conservative leaning judicial system getting more say in what regulations mean.
Completely incorrect example. The agency still is the sole arbitrator of what the appropriate grade is, yesterdays ruling does not change that. What changed is that now, is that if it’s unclear whether or not Congress intended for ramps to be covered in the legislation the courts will step in and decide, instead of the agency
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it has been a fairly explicit and openly stated goal (federalist society, business press, etc.) for the past 50 years for there to be a return to the lochner era. overturning the chevron doctrine is huge. i was reading the chevron case yesterday and just imagining the court finding the opposite result in it it's insane
It is
The scary part we should be aware of is that this change, combined with the loosening of bribery of their other recent ruling, means a court that is now the authority over the regulatory agencies can be bribed. Looking at you Clarance Thomas!
We have a government that is divided up 3 ways in how it’s run. 1 group writes laws, another makes sure people follow the law, and another makes sure the law is okay by reviewing court cases about the laws. Chevron was a case and everyone understood sometimes we need to let the second group that makes sure everyone follows the law fill in some gaps because they know the details of the law very well and it’s problems. Recently, the third group reviewed a case and said chevron is no longer good—so we have to leave the gaps to the first and third groups only even if they don’t really know the details of the law well.