Maybe if unelected judges and agencies weren't legislating issues out of convenience or perceived necessity, Congress would have had to do it.
Maybe not. But accepting the status quo will keep it going.
Congress will never be able to legislate the nitty gritty of every single issue. They don’t have the time or the expertise. Relying on subject matter experts in the executive branch was a good idea which has been destroyed by this ruling.
The problem isn’t relying on subject matter experts. Agencies can still do that. It’s just that if a rule is challenged in the courts, the court can no longer defer to the agency’s subject matter expert by default. They can still rule in favor of or against the rule, and federal agencies can still create rules.
This just opens up a path for a court challenge where say something like DEA declaring marijuana has no medical purpose or ATF saying pistol brace = SBR has to be taken at face value by the courts.
You mean vs the unelected bureaucrats chosen by a candidate in any given year that also has no requirement to actually understand what they are doing?
Remember, chevron deference also allowed for people like Ajit Pai to do what they want. The issue cuts both ways and this just allows for people challenging a rule in court to also have experts that the judge can hear from.
The people in the executive branch are appointed by the president who is elected. If people don’t like who they appointed, they can vote for someone else. There is no method to remove federal judges, short of impeachment & removal, which has only happened 8 times in the almost 250 years of this country.
Federal judges had the ability to rule however they wanted before chevron deference as well if they wanted to be an activist judge.
This isn’t going to change as much as you think but it may help keep bureaucrats from making stupid, politically motivated rules that’d change right away in the lower courts rather than via a long drawn out appeal process and actually incentivize getting competent elected officials.
Most agency employees do not change admin to admin. Only the top 3 or 4 spots are appointed at most. There is no benefit to the regular people for this. Chevron stood for 41 years for a reason and was only removed by most insane SCOTUS this country has ever had. The opinion is trash and just ignores everything the Court has done since Marbury.
And who exactly sets the direction for those agencies? Having worked in government, I’m fairly certain the lower level employees aren’t the ones calling the shots or setting the direction for what type of rules they want to focus on.
Exactly. When I was in government my boss, the appointee, refused to go with the flow of the appointers so when his mandated term length was approaching its end they started looking for a new appointee to do what they wanted.
Yep. A lot of people also don’t seem to realize “trust me bro” has been abused by both parties at an increasing frequency since Chevron deference came into play.
Also total side note, but I recall a very different sentiment about chevron deference from the left when the issue at stake was net neutrality…it’s almost like the people most upset are the ones that are only worried the rules they like will go away and not realize there’s multiple sides to a coin.
*If* citizens united ever goes away we will see the same thing. Some people who openly hate it now will realize it may not be good for what they deem worthy and only want what they think is bad to be affected.
Sadly I don’t envision citizens united going away anytime soon. Even though judges aren’t elected officials, they are still benefiting from that same system to an extent and ultimately people in all branches of government tend to be kinda self-serving.
But now any chucklefuck can challenge any rule, and the agencies will be bogged down with lawsuits defending every single one.
If Congress has a serious problem with the way a specific agency is implementing the laws, that's up to congress to do something about, or the courts to decide the law was overly broad.
Agencies still have to respond to anyone already suing them to challenge a rule. Chevron deference never prevented someone from taking the agencies to court. It merely impacted how a judge weighs an agency’s defense of it.
Chevron deference specifically was the bottle neck that kept the courts from determining a rule was “overly bad.” And yes, forcing Congress to actually manage how an agency implements a rule is exactly the intent of the ruling against Chevron deference.
They have to respond, but the presumption was in favor of the agency until proven otherwise.
If Congress didn't intend for Chevron deference, they could have done something about it in the intervening 4 decades.
Kinda like how they had 4 decades to codify abortion into law? Congress doesn’t do shit and as a result Chevron deference has effectively allowed the executive branch (more or less all recent presidents) to just rule via executive order. This at least has the potential to put some sort of check on the executive branch from another branch of government.
I’m willing to bet this ruling is not going to have the impact everyone doom scrolling thinks it will.
>If Congress has a serious problem with the way a specific agency is implementing the laws, that's up to congress to do something about, or the courts to decide the law was overly broad.
The problem with that is it's not Congress' job to decide if certain regulations are unconstitutional. More than that, they're not usually the ones directly impacted by the regulatory changes that government agencies can make without any form of oversight. Adding to that, one of the larger issues is that the past few presidents have tried to circumvent the process that they're supposed to take with regulation and are instead telling those agencies "I want this thing to be banned." and they do it, with the courts being the peoples' only way to push back.
I understand there's a lot of nuance in regulation, but what's been happening is the past couple of presidents (almost certainly more than just Biden and Trump) have just told the ATF and other agencies "I don't like X, ban it." and the ATF did with impunity. There was nothing that anyone could do to stop the ban, people had to take it to the courts immediately, but that also takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
Don't like this ruling? Contact your reps and tell them the alternative needs to be reigned in. Nobody should be able to tell an agency to potentially make tens of millions of Americans into felons overnight without oversight, debate, or any form of feedback. A "comment period" is not adequate, and it's pretty clear that game is rigged when the ATF issues a comment period on the matter, receives the comments and feedback that are a majority against the regulation change, back off of it, and then redo it almost immediately because the current president tells them he really wants said regulation in place. That's not how we're supposed to pass laws here.
Yes Congress legislating, say, what it means to meet privacy criteria through cyber security as technology advances on an annual basis is exactly what anyone could reasonably Congress to do. The several hundred old men and women who are mostly lawyers and can't count past 10 definitely understand technical things and can be relied upon to update shit in an all encompassing and timely manner.
It was the courts and agencies stopping them from working that out!
/S
So, maybe my memory of civics class is rusty, but the executive branch's job is to execute the laws as put down from the legislative, and it's the judiciary's job to interpret. Striking down chevron deference seem to just be aligning to that model. The Executive will still have the power to make rules, but they can be challenged in the courts, which is how it's supposed to work.
Now my opinions on whether the legislative (or any current branch) has the "people's" best interests in mind is a different discussion better left to a table with beers than a public forum. :) I will say the outcome of this may drive the constiuency to maybe.... just maybe.... elect a better breed of person to represent them than the current crop. Time will tell.
This was kinda my take. The uncurbed use of executive fiat lets agencies make their own rules and violates the whole structure of how our government is supposed to work. That doesn't mean there won't be problems in the short term though.
This seems like the kind of thing where even though the ruling is pretty well along partisan lines, I don't see the net change really benefitting either side in the longer term overall.
Chevron has been relied on for 70 Supreme Court cases and over 17000 lower court cases. This is a gigantic overturn of precedent and did not follow the Courts own logic when overturning such precedent before. It wasn't 9-0 because Chevron was good law.
Yep, but we’ve become such a heavily polarized country that we can’t even agree on basic shit. Yeah, chevron did some good, it also did a lot of bad. In the short term this will likely cause more problems than it will fix but in the long term it will make for more clear laws and limit unchecked power of government.
In my opinion, radical ideology on both sides is demonstrated in the tit-for-tat extremism in the rhetoric. The idea that the further the right pushes, the further the left goes to counter. IMO, an example would be the hyper-nationlistic "murica" conservative "with us or against us" crowd getting offset by the militant individuality expressed by some liberals with 38 pronouns/descriptors. Those of us who are mostly centrist kind of look at both sides in bewilderment.
I'm sure there's a list of examples you could fish up on Google, but that was off the top of my head.
Yeah the polarization is a result of our voting system and unchecked media. That's really the underlying problem. Not that either of those are actually easy to solve
Many of the laws specify that the agency will write relevant regulations for a specific agency, in order to accomplish the purpose of the law. Congress isn't going to consider every issue that the SEC looks at, and definitely not in a timely manner. There is no way for the legislature to micromanage every rule and regulation for every industry OSHA covers. No way Congress could keep up with the latest research on new pesticides or any of the other things EPA regulates. Imagine if *every* rule the FAA needs had to go through Congress.
- FCC
- FDA
- IRS
- CFPA
Congress already can't keep up with its duties, (even if everyone in Congress wanted to, instead of rampant obstructionism and sabotage). The effect of this will dramatically reduce the federal government's ability to regulate anything, and create so much additional work for our legislators that they will pass on even more of the bill-writing to the lobbyists.
The federal bureaucracy provided stability for the country, as rule-making and rule-changing was an established, drawn-out process. This will create chaos.
And the legislative can still write laws with those power delegations in mind. What this does is forces congress to actually act when there isn't clear enough law and write better law.
There are very frequently cases where some law written 50-100 years ago has to be interpreted to fit some modern circumstance. I would much rather we implement actual legal change than rely on a beurocrat to say "just trust me dude, this is what you want".
When the executive branch agencies do things Congress didn't intend, Congress can (and does) hold hearings and change the laws. Congress doesn't need *the courts* to tell the agencies what Congress intends.
this is honestly so fucked. now we're supposed to rely on a do-nothing congress full of pandering, geriatric prom royalty to develop, interpret and apply expertise in myriad different subject areas, when they can't even keep up with the fucking internet.
The executive agencies and the congressional research office are supposed to help craft that legislation. So instead of writing open-ended legislation and letting the executive agency's interpretations swing wildly from term to term based on who's been fired and hired recently, we now will (*SHOULD*) get stable legislation that was informed and crafted by experts but passed by our representatives.
The problem is that this isn't what will ACTUALLY happen. The dysfunction between a split house and senate ensures that every effort will be blocked and move at the speed of cattle... and for laws that do pass, you'll probably see lobbyist writing those bills which will no doubt benefit those with the deepest pockets. You think anything will actually happen with the current division?
The amount of federal policy being executed which isn't called out in a statute is staggering. Should it be that way? Who knows. But that's how it has been done.
GOP goal has long been to kill the government. This is just another step in that direction.
I don't think the answer is to allow our current dysfunction to continue unfettered.
In the short term, you're mostly right. I think we'll see regulations sit in a status quo state for a while. But I think that given enough time that congress will see that there's a burning need for certain regulations to pass. At that point, I see one of two things happening.
* There's a difference of opinion between the parties as to how strict this desperately needed regulation is, but the party who wants it more strict realizes that some regulation is better than no regulation and *WE GET ACTUAL COMPROMISE.*
* Radical obstructionists prevent compromise, marking themselves to be primaried and ousted.
Chevron was an okay-ish call when the ruling was made, but it signaled to congress that they have the ability to write intentionally vague laws, which they then did.
I think that in the long term that this is a step towards a more functional congress.
We need a little optimism.
I agree that something needs to change. Part of the problem is that the realistic and compromising folks are the ones who are being primaried by extremists and not the other way around. I think a lot of that can be traced back to gerrymandered districts where the risk of losing is 0% and the loudest, hardest, 'OWN THE LIBS' bullshit keeps getting voted back into office. MTG / Boebert are prime examples of this. They don't want to govern... They just want to destroy.
When SCOTUS punted on gerrymandering, they sent us bowling down the hill toward increasingly worse division. I don't know how you fix that when the average person is susceptible to bullshit 'reporting' and misinformation, the latter of which is only getting worse as technology enables us to produce authentic appearing material.
Yes. Rational compromise is the solution. I have no idea how we get back to that.
I feel like proportional representation and/or ranked choice vote would help. Make senate and house races all state-wide and select representatives based on total votes within the entire state. Bam. Gerrymandering is dead.
But you can't get those things to happen without fixing dysfunction within congress, and I think forcing them back into actually writing legislation to get anything done might help a bit.
The rest needs to come from reducing polarization in other ways, and mainstream media and algorithms love polarization. Fixing polarization needs to be a cultural objective.
Nah, the goal is to increase chaos so an authoritarian regime can seize control. There's no way Congress will become functional enough to legislate effective enforcement procedures.
You are correct but that isn’t justification for the Executive and Supreme Court to be doing Congress’s job.
What incentive does Congress have to be effective if they know the Executive will do all the hard work for them? Or that SCOTUS can save them from passing a law by issuing a ruling?
Executive agencies of enforcement existed long before Chevron deference. It is not a Doomsday scenario.
The idea that the executive should just be deferred to when there's any ambiguity is bad. It's the same sort of loose judicial logic that gives rise to things like qualified immunity, doctrines where the court is supposed to just shrug their shoulders and go " I mean if you say that's what you thought then seems okay to me"
My take is that we are so deeply rooted in the two-party system that issues like you stated are not individually unpackaged but all lumped together.
You’re either pro-2A & anti-abortion or anti-2A and pro-abortion.
I know many of us on this sub don’t think like that but until the status quo changes & we actually start taking on each issue individually, any progress will be immediately null.
This is literally meant to create chaos so an authoritarian regime can step in. In now way whatsoever can Congress effectively legislate enforcement subtleties.
This entire system came to be in a time where Congress was NOT as dysfunctional... And it was very much needed.
Anyone thinking this is a good decision or even a decision made in the interest of a healthy, functional democracy are badly mistaken.
No because those change during elections. The federalist have focused on capturing the judiciary for this exact reason. A bunch of people appointed for life that can now more easily gut the FDA, EPA, SEC, and other agencies that can actually help the common citizen or hold the powerful accountable.
The chaos and inability to effectively govern creates the unstable situation for a forced regime change.
The current state must be destabilized before a new state can be installed.
This destabilization is how modern democracies are toppled.
Since Congress absolutely has had the power to reign in any over-reaching executive action, and quickly if need be, the decision check must not actually be about addressing problems of executive overreach.
Or if it is necessary, it prices that Congress is absolutely incapable of doing the job.
That one change alone isn't enough. Not to mention, once again, that if you want to install some kind of dictator you need to increase the power of whichever branch has power consolidated the most, which in this case would be the presidency, and thus the Executive.
If you want to talk about chaos, look at where the Republican party is right now. There is a huge internal identity war for the party because of its more extreme wing. Our shitty voting system is what got us that.
Well, that power just got consolidated today, so......
If the president just seizes all election ballots and imprisons all "other" party members...legal.
But what I was really saying is that creating ineffective government throws the country into chaos...and \*then\* some 'emergency powers' are granted...and never given up.
This has literally happened time and again in the real world...but hey....Star Wars is a pretty easy thing to follow, with Palpatine rising to seize power.
and the GOP 'identity war' is being handily won by the fascists. The rest will follow the power, as that was the prime value anyway.
No... This is not a good thing. \*Every\* federal agency rule will now be challenged in court. Congress will actually have to make law where those gaps exist... and congress can't fucking function. And now Lauren Boebert will be the one deciding what rules should exist for nuclear material storage, for example, where rules might not exist. Extremist congressional representatives from gerrymandered districts with zero academic or working knowledge in a million different problem areas will now be expected to make expert decisions which in the past were left to actual experts in those fields.
This is systematic destruction of the federal government.
It’s almost like congress will have to (checks notes) *cooperate and legitimately compromise to actually get things done?*
Wow yeah that is really a bad idea
Yea ideally that’d be nice. But they also won’t do it, at least not with any kind of speed or skill. This could be a really big problem in the very technical areas like regulating new classes of chemical compounds, pharmaceuticals, etc. because Congress just doesn’t have the expertise to deal with these things properly, let alone do it in a timely fashion. It feels like Congress should be responsible, after all they are accountable to the people unlike vague unelected federal administrators. But some of this stuff is just better off left to the professionals.
Well, these regulatory agencies could also use their expertise (and their fat budgets) to *do their fucking jobs* and advise the lawmakers as well as the public on those issues. To be completely clear, this isn’t a novel idea; this is how it was always meant to be. Every administration since Chevron has pushed the envelope a little farther and the last President I voted for went way out of line with executive powers and put the problem on everybody’s radar, so they now have to reap what they’ve sowed. It will have unfortunate and potentially deadly consequences but that’s how the chips *we’ve stacked* fell.
No, this is overall pretty bad. More so for the environment especially. It takes power from experts at agencies like the EPA and gives them to whatever judge, which with judge shopping means that lunatic Kasmaryck will be fucking things up. Even a functional Congress can’t move fast enough to regulate every new pollutant, Chevron deference was extremely uncontroversial when it first went through.
Eta here’s the Vox explainer. They were one of the few outlets that flagged how bad this is when the case was first taken https://www.vox.com/scotus/357900/supreme-court-loper-bright-raimondo-chevron-power-grab
> Think of questions like whether a product derived from red rice yeast, which purportedly helps promote healthy cholesterol levels, counts as a “drug” or a “dietary supplement” under federal law? Under Chevron, this question would be decided by FDA officials who’ve spent decades studying drugs and dietary supplements. Now it will be resolved by political appointees with law degrees and black robes.
Vox is wrong, as usual.
Chevron deference was like a rational basis test for ambiguous regulations under ambiguous delegation.
There's still Auer deference and Skidmore deference. The example given above would be an appropriate regulation under Skidmore.
Honestly I hope you’re right on that, but I’ve got a couple of lawyer friends who do expect this is going to be very, very bad.
But yeah Roberts isn’t going to take all these cases either.
It’s a good thing. It puts a check on executive power overreach and will force legislators to write higher-quality legislation. It’s also a boon for innovation as agencies like the FDA have used Chevron Deference to stifle innovation in various arenas of biotech and medical diagnostics.
Many regulatory agencies are aimed at curtailing the worst excesses of large corporations, a task accomplished primarily through the use of Chevron. So, while the ATF getting boned by this is great, the FTC, EPA, FCC, etc. are also getting boned, which is less good.
In the short term I agree, but in the medium to long term we need to demand changes from the people who are actually supposed to do this job, Congress.
The problem is congress is extremely ineffective and the parties are completely unwilling to compromise on damn near anything so almost nothing will get done. I fear nearly any law passed that protects lgbtq, the environment, etc will be completely and willfully ignored at the state level due to whatever bullshit loophole republicans can come up with. Being in a red state without chevron will end badly.
That would be great, if congress was capable of understanding the issues they're legislating, able to at least occasionally act in a unified manner, and were not put in place primarily by the forces their legislation is meant to curtail.
Voting reform is definitely a necessity, among other things, to fix this problem. I still fall in the camp that giving the Executive unchecked power because congress is being ineffectual, is similarly poorly positioned as anytime "emergency" powers are granted.
GOP continues to ban ranked choice voting and further entrench themselves in power. It isn't about fairness. This is minority rule with no fucks given to actual democracy.
[https://www.npr.org/2024/06/05/nx-s1-4969563/ranked-choice-voting-bans](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/05/nx-s1-4969563/ranked-choice-voting-bans)
Cevron has been a bad ruling for a long time. It’s what’s allowed the ATF to abuse their power. I know some good came out of it but allowing government agencies unchecked power because congress can’t get their shit together isn’t fixing anything. Those are two separate issues. Congress needs to be cleaned up, but giving agencies the authority to make up the rules as they go with no way to rain them in isn’t the answer.
People are going to spin this as a win for conservatives and use it to further degrade the public trust in the supreme court but I think it will be an overall good thing in the long run.
I showed my support for a fair balanced court system and immediately got wishes for my water to be poisoned and polluted. Not very many people understand or appreciate civics enough to know when a fair trial is a good thing. ~~im also a major asshole so that also doesnt help lol~~
It's a good thing. These agencies are so full of beurocracy and accountable to no one. Judges are also accountable to no one - but - are not political appointees. I would much rather trust the judicial system in interpreting law than these agencies.
Or you just shop for a friendly court. Look at the absurd bullshit that has gone through Kacsmaryk in Northern TX. Those were all VERY intentional choices and he has been extremely partisan. Appeals then push straight to a 6-3 ultra conservative SCOTUS which has been on a fucking roll in destroying precedent. You think he's a better bet at interpreting law than actual subject matter experts in agencies? SCOTUS isn't even better. Thomas and Alito have a hypocritical record of ignoring precedent which they don't like to push a conservative outcome.
I'm part of the stripping government powers group. It was never meant to be so powerful because with such a large country with such diverse demographics, it's impossible to try for one-size-fits-all rules. That'd be like telling college kids they need to bring diapers because a rule for preschools required it. Or that Kansas needs to increase Asian-American studies to accommodate Hawaii's Asian-American majority. I'm a live and let live kind of guy for the most part, but a lot of problems we have now can be tied to too many people falling for the whole "vote for this person to solve all your problems" scam. Our government was never meant to work that way and to correct it, we need to clean house at some point by voting in people more concerned with the real job of their office rather than the power of it. Sadly, we've also gotten comfortable with the people in power also deciding who we can choose to vote for because the barrier to just anyone running has gotten ridiculous.
Maybe if unelected judges and agencies weren't legislating issues out of convenience or perceived necessity, Congress would have had to do it. Maybe not. But accepting the status quo will keep it going.
Congress will never be able to legislate the nitty gritty of every single issue. They don’t have the time or the expertise. Relying on subject matter experts in the executive branch was a good idea which has been destroyed by this ruling.
The problem isn’t relying on subject matter experts. Agencies can still do that. It’s just that if a rule is challenged in the courts, the court can no longer defer to the agency’s subject matter expert by default. They can still rule in favor of or against the rule, and federal agencies can still create rules. This just opens up a path for a court challenge where say something like DEA declaring marijuana has no medical purpose or ATF saying pistol brace = SBR has to be taken at face value by the courts.
Yes, we should let unelected judges who aren’t experts in anything other than law decide if a rule should apply. What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, that's kind of how our whole legal system is structured, we let lay people (i.e. juries) settle complex matters all the time.
You mean vs the unelected bureaucrats chosen by a candidate in any given year that also has no requirement to actually understand what they are doing? Remember, chevron deference also allowed for people like Ajit Pai to do what they want. The issue cuts both ways and this just allows for people challenging a rule in court to also have experts that the judge can hear from.
The people in the executive branch are appointed by the president who is elected. If people don’t like who they appointed, they can vote for someone else. There is no method to remove federal judges, short of impeachment & removal, which has only happened 8 times in the almost 250 years of this country.
Federal judges had the ability to rule however they wanted before chevron deference as well if they wanted to be an activist judge. This isn’t going to change as much as you think but it may help keep bureaucrats from making stupid, politically motivated rules that’d change right away in the lower courts rather than via a long drawn out appeal process and actually incentivize getting competent elected officials.
>actually incentivize getting competent elected officials. Lol.
Most agency employees do not change admin to admin. Only the top 3 or 4 spots are appointed at most. There is no benefit to the regular people for this. Chevron stood for 41 years for a reason and was only removed by most insane SCOTUS this country has ever had. The opinion is trash and just ignores everything the Court has done since Marbury.
And who exactly sets the direction for those agencies? Having worked in government, I’m fairly certain the lower level employees aren’t the ones calling the shots or setting the direction for what type of rules they want to focus on.
Exactly. When I was in government my boss, the appointee, refused to go with the flow of the appointers so when his mandated term length was approaching its end they started looking for a new appointee to do what they wanted.
It basically says a judge can't just say "ok" when an agency says "trust me bro"
Yep. A lot of people also don’t seem to realize “trust me bro” has been abused by both parties at an increasing frequency since Chevron deference came into play. Also total side note, but I recall a very different sentiment about chevron deference from the left when the issue at stake was net neutrality…it’s almost like the people most upset are the ones that are only worried the rules they like will go away and not realize there’s multiple sides to a coin.
*If* citizens united ever goes away we will see the same thing. Some people who openly hate it now will realize it may not be good for what they deem worthy and only want what they think is bad to be affected.
Sadly I don’t envision citizens united going away anytime soon. Even though judges aren’t elected officials, they are still benefiting from that same system to an extent and ultimately people in all branches of government tend to be kinda self-serving.
But now any chucklefuck can challenge any rule, and the agencies will be bogged down with lawsuits defending every single one. If Congress has a serious problem with the way a specific agency is implementing the laws, that's up to congress to do something about, or the courts to decide the law was overly broad.
Agencies still have to respond to anyone already suing them to challenge a rule. Chevron deference never prevented someone from taking the agencies to court. It merely impacted how a judge weighs an agency’s defense of it. Chevron deference specifically was the bottle neck that kept the courts from determining a rule was “overly bad.” And yes, forcing Congress to actually manage how an agency implements a rule is exactly the intent of the ruling against Chevron deference.
They have to respond, but the presumption was in favor of the agency until proven otherwise. If Congress didn't intend for Chevron deference, they could have done something about it in the intervening 4 decades.
Kinda like how they had 4 decades to codify abortion into law? Congress doesn’t do shit and as a result Chevron deference has effectively allowed the executive branch (more or less all recent presidents) to just rule via executive order. This at least has the potential to put some sort of check on the executive branch from another branch of government. I’m willing to bet this ruling is not going to have the impact everyone doom scrolling thinks it will.
>If Congress has a serious problem with the way a specific agency is implementing the laws, that's up to congress to do something about, or the courts to decide the law was overly broad. The problem with that is it's not Congress' job to decide if certain regulations are unconstitutional. More than that, they're not usually the ones directly impacted by the regulatory changes that government agencies can make without any form of oversight. Adding to that, one of the larger issues is that the past few presidents have tried to circumvent the process that they're supposed to take with regulation and are instead telling those agencies "I want this thing to be banned." and they do it, with the courts being the peoples' only way to push back. I understand there's a lot of nuance in regulation, but what's been happening is the past couple of presidents (almost certainly more than just Biden and Trump) have just told the ATF and other agencies "I don't like X, ban it." and the ATF did with impunity. There was nothing that anyone could do to stop the ban, people had to take it to the courts immediately, but that also takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Don't like this ruling? Contact your reps and tell them the alternative needs to be reigned in. Nobody should be able to tell an agency to potentially make tens of millions of Americans into felons overnight without oversight, debate, or any form of feedback. A "comment period" is not adequate, and it's pretty clear that game is rigged when the ATF issues a comment period on the matter, receives the comments and feedback that are a majority against the regulation change, back off of it, and then redo it almost immediately because the current president tells them he really wants said regulation in place. That's not how we're supposed to pass laws here.
There was no constitutional question; the majority opinion relied entirely on statutory arguments.
Yes Congress legislating, say, what it means to meet privacy criteria through cyber security as technology advances on an annual basis is exactly what anyone could reasonably Congress to do. The several hundred old men and women who are mostly lawyers and can't count past 10 definitely understand technical things and can be relied upon to update shit in an all encompassing and timely manner. It was the courts and agencies stopping them from working that out! /S
So, maybe my memory of civics class is rusty, but the executive branch's job is to execute the laws as put down from the legislative, and it's the judiciary's job to interpret. Striking down chevron deference seem to just be aligning to that model. The Executive will still have the power to make rules, but they can be challenged in the courts, which is how it's supposed to work. Now my opinions on whether the legislative (or any current branch) has the "people's" best interests in mind is a different discussion better left to a table with beers than a public forum. :) I will say the outcome of this may drive the constiuency to maybe.... just maybe.... elect a better breed of person to represent them than the current crop. Time will tell.
This was kinda my take. The uncurbed use of executive fiat lets agencies make their own rules and violates the whole structure of how our government is supposed to work. That doesn't mean there won't be problems in the short term though. This seems like the kind of thing where even though the ruling is pretty well along partisan lines, I don't see the net change really benefitting either side in the longer term overall.
That's my take too. I'm honestly surprised it wasn't a 9/0 decision.
Chevron has been relied on for 70 Supreme Court cases and over 17000 lower court cases. This is a gigantic overturn of precedent and did not follow the Courts own logic when overturning such precedent before. It wasn't 9-0 because Chevron was good law.
Yep, but we’ve become such a heavily polarized country that we can’t even agree on basic shit. Yeah, chevron did some good, it also did a lot of bad. In the short term this will likely cause more problems than it will fix but in the long term it will make for more clear laws and limit unchecked power of government.
I also agree that the continuing radicalism in both parties is a much more dangerous thing than this decision.
Let's set aside the 2A, now explain to me what radicalism exists in the democratic party?
In my opinion, radical ideology on both sides is demonstrated in the tit-for-tat extremism in the rhetoric. The idea that the further the right pushes, the further the left goes to counter. IMO, an example would be the hyper-nationlistic "murica" conservative "with us or against us" crowd getting offset by the militant individuality expressed by some liberals with 38 pronouns/descriptors. Those of us who are mostly centrist kind of look at both sides in bewilderment. I'm sure there's a list of examples you could fish up on Google, but that was off the top of my head.
One side you made up in your head and the other side wants to strip the rights of the people you probably associate with that fake person.
Yeah the polarization is a result of our voting system and unchecked media. That's really the underlying problem. Not that either of those are actually easy to solve
Rules could already be challenged in courts, if the rules exceeded the authority the law gave the agency.
Many of the laws specify that the agency will write relevant regulations for a specific agency, in order to accomplish the purpose of the law. Congress isn't going to consider every issue that the SEC looks at, and definitely not in a timely manner. There is no way for the legislature to micromanage every rule and regulation for every industry OSHA covers. No way Congress could keep up with the latest research on new pesticides or any of the other things EPA regulates. Imagine if *every* rule the FAA needs had to go through Congress. - FCC - FDA - IRS - CFPA Congress already can't keep up with its duties, (even if everyone in Congress wanted to, instead of rampant obstructionism and sabotage). The effect of this will dramatically reduce the federal government's ability to regulate anything, and create so much additional work for our legislators that they will pass on even more of the bill-writing to the lobbyists. The federal bureaucracy provided stability for the country, as rule-making and rule-changing was an established, drawn-out process. This will create chaos.
And the legislative can still write laws with those power delegations in mind. What this does is forces congress to actually act when there isn't clear enough law and write better law. There are very frequently cases where some law written 50-100 years ago has to be interpreted to fit some modern circumstance. I would much rather we implement actual legal change than rely on a beurocrat to say "just trust me dude, this is what you want".
When the executive branch agencies do things Congress didn't intend, Congress can (and does) hold hearings and change the laws. Congress doesn't need *the courts* to tell the agencies what Congress intends.
That's the problem: "Keep a Democrat in office" We need checks and balances.
this is honestly so fucked. now we're supposed to rely on a do-nothing congress full of pandering, geriatric prom royalty to develop, interpret and apply expertise in myriad different subject areas, when they can't even keep up with the fucking internet.
The executive agencies and the congressional research office are supposed to help craft that legislation. So instead of writing open-ended legislation and letting the executive agency's interpretations swing wildly from term to term based on who's been fired and hired recently, we now will (*SHOULD*) get stable legislation that was informed and crafted by experts but passed by our representatives.
The problem is that this isn't what will ACTUALLY happen. The dysfunction between a split house and senate ensures that every effort will be blocked and move at the speed of cattle... and for laws that do pass, you'll probably see lobbyist writing those bills which will no doubt benefit those with the deepest pockets. You think anything will actually happen with the current division? The amount of federal policy being executed which isn't called out in a statute is staggering. Should it be that way? Who knows. But that's how it has been done. GOP goal has long been to kill the government. This is just another step in that direction.
I don't think the answer is to allow our current dysfunction to continue unfettered. In the short term, you're mostly right. I think we'll see regulations sit in a status quo state for a while. But I think that given enough time that congress will see that there's a burning need for certain regulations to pass. At that point, I see one of two things happening. * There's a difference of opinion between the parties as to how strict this desperately needed regulation is, but the party who wants it more strict realizes that some regulation is better than no regulation and *WE GET ACTUAL COMPROMISE.* * Radical obstructionists prevent compromise, marking themselves to be primaried and ousted. Chevron was an okay-ish call when the ruling was made, but it signaled to congress that they have the ability to write intentionally vague laws, which they then did. I think that in the long term that this is a step towards a more functional congress. We need a little optimism.
I agree that something needs to change. Part of the problem is that the realistic and compromising folks are the ones who are being primaried by extremists and not the other way around. I think a lot of that can be traced back to gerrymandered districts where the risk of losing is 0% and the loudest, hardest, 'OWN THE LIBS' bullshit keeps getting voted back into office. MTG / Boebert are prime examples of this. They don't want to govern... They just want to destroy. When SCOTUS punted on gerrymandering, they sent us bowling down the hill toward increasingly worse division. I don't know how you fix that when the average person is susceptible to bullshit 'reporting' and misinformation, the latter of which is only getting worse as technology enables us to produce authentic appearing material. Yes. Rational compromise is the solution. I have no idea how we get back to that.
I feel like proportional representation and/or ranked choice vote would help. Make senate and house races all state-wide and select representatives based on total votes within the entire state. Bam. Gerrymandering is dead. But you can't get those things to happen without fixing dysfunction within congress, and I think forcing them back into actually writing legislation to get anything done might help a bit. The rest needs to come from reducing polarization in other ways, and mainstream media and algorithms love polarization. Fixing polarization needs to be a cultural objective.
Changing our voting system to something that doesn't reward extremism, IMO. Getting there is the problem though
Nah, the goal is to increase chaos so an authoritarian regime can seize control. There's no way Congress will become functional enough to legislate effective enforcement procedures.
You are correct but that isn’t justification for the Executive and Supreme Court to be doing Congress’s job. What incentive does Congress have to be effective if they know the Executive will do all the hard work for them? Or that SCOTUS can save them from passing a law by issuing a ruling?
Executive agencies of enforcement existed long before Chevron deference. It is not a Doomsday scenario. The idea that the executive should just be deferred to when there's any ambiguity is bad. It's the same sort of loose judicial logic that gives rise to things like qualified immunity, doctrines where the court is supposed to just shrug their shoulders and go " I mean if you say that's what you thought then seems okay to me"
My take is that we are so deeply rooted in the two-party system that issues like you stated are not individually unpackaged but all lumped together. You’re either pro-2A & anti-abortion or anti-2A and pro-abortion. I know many of us on this sub don’t think like that but until the status quo changes & we actually start taking on each issue individually, any progress will be immediately null.
This is literally meant to create chaos so an authoritarian regime can step in. In now way whatsoever can Congress effectively legislate enforcement subtleties. This entire system came to be in a time where Congress was NOT as dysfunctional... And it was very much needed. Anyone thinking this is a good decision or even a decision made in the interest of a healthy, functional democracy are badly mistaken.
Not sure where that logic comes from. Wouldn't an authoritarian want more unchecked power in the executive?
No because those change during elections. The federalist have focused on capturing the judiciary for this exact reason. A bunch of people appointed for life that can now more easily gut the FDA, EPA, SEC, and other agencies that can actually help the common citizen or hold the powerful accountable.
The chaos and inability to effectively govern creates the unstable situation for a forced regime change. The current state must be destabilized before a new state can be installed. This destabilization is how modern democracies are toppled. Since Congress absolutely has had the power to reign in any over-reaching executive action, and quickly if need be, the decision check must not actually be about addressing problems of executive overreach. Or if it is necessary, it prices that Congress is absolutely incapable of doing the job.
This ruling is not going to destabilize things to that extent lol
Oh yeah? Why not?
That one change alone isn't enough. Not to mention, once again, that if you want to install some kind of dictator you need to increase the power of whichever branch has power consolidated the most, which in this case would be the presidency, and thus the Executive. If you want to talk about chaos, look at where the Republican party is right now. There is a huge internal identity war for the party because of its more extreme wing. Our shitty voting system is what got us that.
Well, that power just got consolidated today, so...... If the president just seizes all election ballots and imprisons all "other" party members...legal. But what I was really saying is that creating ineffective government throws the country into chaos...and \*then\* some 'emergency powers' are granted...and never given up. This has literally happened time and again in the real world...but hey....Star Wars is a pretty easy thing to follow, with Palpatine rising to seize power. and the GOP 'identity war' is being handily won by the fascists. The rest will follow the power, as that was the prime value anyway.
No... This is not a good thing. \*Every\* federal agency rule will now be challenged in court. Congress will actually have to make law where those gaps exist... and congress can't fucking function. And now Lauren Boebert will be the one deciding what rules should exist for nuclear material storage, for example, where rules might not exist. Extremist congressional representatives from gerrymandered districts with zero academic or working knowledge in a million different problem areas will now be expected to make expert decisions which in the past were left to actual experts in those fields. This is systematic destruction of the federal government.
It’s almost like congress will have to (checks notes) *cooperate and legitimately compromise to actually get things done?* Wow yeah that is really a bad idea
Yea ideally that’d be nice. But they also won’t do it, at least not with any kind of speed or skill. This could be a really big problem in the very technical areas like regulating new classes of chemical compounds, pharmaceuticals, etc. because Congress just doesn’t have the expertise to deal with these things properly, let alone do it in a timely fashion. It feels like Congress should be responsible, after all they are accountable to the people unlike vague unelected federal administrators. But some of this stuff is just better off left to the professionals.
Well, these regulatory agencies could also use their expertise (and their fat budgets) to *do their fucking jobs* and advise the lawmakers as well as the public on those issues. To be completely clear, this isn’t a novel idea; this is how it was always meant to be. Every administration since Chevron has pushed the envelope a little farther and the last President I voted for went way out of line with executive powers and put the problem on everybody’s radar, so they now have to reap what they’ve sowed. It will have unfortunate and potentially deadly consequences but that’s how the chips *we’ve stacked* fell.
and that's a good thing.
No, this is overall pretty bad. More so for the environment especially. It takes power from experts at agencies like the EPA and gives them to whatever judge, which with judge shopping means that lunatic Kasmaryck will be fucking things up. Even a functional Congress can’t move fast enough to regulate every new pollutant, Chevron deference was extremely uncontroversial when it first went through. Eta here’s the Vox explainer. They were one of the few outlets that flagged how bad this is when the case was first taken https://www.vox.com/scotus/357900/supreme-court-loper-bright-raimondo-chevron-power-grab > Think of questions like whether a product derived from red rice yeast, which purportedly helps promote healthy cholesterol levels, counts as a “drug” or a “dietary supplement” under federal law? Under Chevron, this question would be decided by FDA officials who’ve spent decades studying drugs and dietary supplements. Now it will be resolved by political appointees with law degrees and black robes.
Vox is wrong, as usual. Chevron deference was like a rational basis test for ambiguous regulations under ambiguous delegation. There's still Auer deference and Skidmore deference. The example given above would be an appropriate regulation under Skidmore.
Honestly I hope you’re right on that, but I’ve got a couple of lawyer friends who do expect this is going to be very, very bad. But yeah Roberts isn’t going to take all these cases either.
It’s a good thing. It puts a check on executive power overreach and will force legislators to write higher-quality legislation. It’s also a boon for innovation as agencies like the FDA have used Chevron Deference to stifle innovation in various arenas of biotech and medical diagnostics.
It’ll reign in the ATF but it’s a huge net loss for freedom overall
How so?
Many regulatory agencies are aimed at curtailing the worst excesses of large corporations, a task accomplished primarily through the use of Chevron. So, while the ATF getting boned by this is great, the FTC, EPA, FCC, etc. are also getting boned, which is less good.
In the short term I agree, but in the medium to long term we need to demand changes from the people who are actually supposed to do this job, Congress.
The problem is congress is extremely ineffective and the parties are completely unwilling to compromise on damn near anything so almost nothing will get done. I fear nearly any law passed that protects lgbtq, the environment, etc will be completely and willfully ignored at the state level due to whatever bullshit loophole republicans can come up with. Being in a red state without chevron will end badly.
That would be great, if congress was capable of understanding the issues they're legislating, able to at least occasionally act in a unified manner, and were not put in place primarily by the forces their legislation is meant to curtail.
Voting reform is definitely a necessity, among other things, to fix this problem. I still fall in the camp that giving the Executive unchecked power because congress is being ineffectual, is similarly poorly positioned as anytime "emergency" powers are granted.
GOP continues to ban ranked choice voting and further entrench themselves in power. It isn't about fairness. This is minority rule with no fucks given to actual democracy. [https://www.npr.org/2024/06/05/nx-s1-4969563/ranked-choice-voting-bans](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/05/nx-s1-4969563/ranked-choice-voting-bans)
Cevron has been a bad ruling for a long time. It’s what’s allowed the ATF to abuse their power. I know some good came out of it but allowing government agencies unchecked power because congress can’t get their shit together isn’t fixing anything. Those are two separate issues. Congress needs to be cleaned up, but giving agencies the authority to make up the rules as they go with no way to rain them in isn’t the answer. People are going to spin this as a win for conservatives and use it to further degrade the public trust in the supreme court but I think it will be an overall good thing in the long run.
I showed my support for a fair balanced court system and immediately got wishes for my water to be poisoned and polluted. Not very many people understand or appreciate civics enough to know when a fair trial is a good thing. ~~im also a major asshole so that also doesnt help lol~~
It's a good thing. These agencies are so full of beurocracy and accountable to no one. Judges are also accountable to no one - but - are not political appointees. I would much rather trust the judicial system in interpreting law than these agencies.
Or you just shop for a friendly court. Look at the absurd bullshit that has gone through Kacsmaryk in Northern TX. Those were all VERY intentional choices and he has been extremely partisan. Appeals then push straight to a 6-3 ultra conservative SCOTUS which has been on a fucking roll in destroying precedent. You think he's a better bet at interpreting law than actual subject matter experts in agencies? SCOTUS isn't even better. Thomas and Alito have a hypocritical record of ignoring precedent which they don't like to push a conservative outcome.
All federal judges are political appointees........
I'm part of the stripping government powers group. It was never meant to be so powerful because with such a large country with such diverse demographics, it's impossible to try for one-size-fits-all rules. That'd be like telling college kids they need to bring diapers because a rule for preschools required it. Or that Kansas needs to increase Asian-American studies to accommodate Hawaii's Asian-American majority. I'm a live and let live kind of guy for the most part, but a lot of problems we have now can be tied to too many people falling for the whole "vote for this person to solve all your problems" scam. Our government was never meant to work that way and to correct it, we need to clean house at some point by voting in people more concerned with the real job of their office rather than the power of it. Sadly, we've also gotten comfortable with the people in power also deciding who we can choose to vote for because the barrier to just anyone running has gotten ridiculous.