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Comment by sabarn01 | Hacker News Reader

This is framed in a very specific way. The real question is how much latitude administrative agencies should be given. Chevron says a lot and it says that they don't have to be consistent, nor do they have to even meet the plain meaning of the legislation. The issue this causes is it allows congress to not legislate, but pass the buck to the administrate agency. Congress has been dysfunctional for so long we have come to expect it, but it doesn't mean it’s good for our system.

If congress wants something regulated, they should pass a law and give guidance and the agency should have to meet the clear meaning of the law until its changed by congress. In general, a new president shouldn't affect how agencies implement the will of congress but chevron kinda implicitly allows this. There are lots of regulations that may be swept away if we do away with Chevron but I think it will make the system more accountable and force congress to do its job.

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Perhaps, but it is key to keep in mind the direction of the push and the trend here — this is strongly anti-democratic and pro-authoritarain.

To gauge democracy, examine how power is distributed among the institutions, both within and outside of govt.

In democracies, there is substantial or complete independence between the branches of govt — legislative, judicial, and executive, and portions of the executive, and various societal organizations — industry, academy, religions, social groups, sport, etc.

Under authoritarianism, all of the branches of govt and the societal organizations are bent to the serve the ruling group.

This is obviously an attempt by Musk, et. al. on these govt agencies to either eliminate them, or ensure that their will is subject to the whims of these would-be oligarchs. In short, it's a power grab, attempting to take a step towards turning workers back into serfs.

I view it as an effort to restore congress's power which it has frittered away. Congress is the most democratic institution we have and it gets refreshed every 2 years. The thing I want to happen is that there is a way to assure that the elected portion of government, the congress, gets to set our policy not unelected administrate officials.

You also need to view this from both sides. The more freedom of action the agencies have the more they are effectively tools of the president. When you like the president that may seem great, but you always need to look at government power though the lense of the worst person you can image having that power.

That's a nice view, and I certainly agree that congress should in many cases be more precise in it's language.

That said, if an agency to so XYZ is founded, it needs the authority to do its job.

If Congress cannot even muster the effort to precisely describe the job, it certainly cannot micromanage each job.

Requiring such, depending on how strict, would effectively gut the agencies ability to do anything.

The issue is one administration will say yes agency y should do x and the next administration will say no it shouldn't. Only congress though its own actions can determine the remit of an agency. The issue isn't the congress has to be specific its that up until now agencies didn't even have to follow the plain meaning of the law. We should not give so much deference in a democratic system to the unelected.

Yes, and of course, this should be decided by the Supreme Court - a group of unelected political appointees with no term limits whose sole authority to decide the meaning of the constitution comes from a court case in which they just granted themselves that power[0].

As for having Congress decide every bit of administrative policy, we've been there. It resulted in Congress wasting its time playing cat-and-mouse games with monied interests. They'd pass a bill banning, say, a certain deceptive trade practice; the people doing that practice would maliciously comply with the law[1] and come up with a new way to do exactly the same thing; and the courts would run interference on legal challenges until Congress updated the law to clearly and unambiguously ban the workaround. Or the courts would squint really hard at antitrust laws and say "Oh, uh, funny story, Congress didn't mean to ban monopolies, they really meant to ban trade unions. Those jokers just don't know how to write laws."

Administrative rulemaking was Congress's way to short-circuit the courts ignoring clear legislative intent. If you think "do what I mean, not what I drafted" is a violation of separation-of-powers, I will counterargue that so is the entire concept of common law. In the US, higher courts don't just have the ability to overturn specific cases; their rulings also create precedent that lower courts are bound by. This is effectively a legislative power, being exercised by political appointees!

The worst president I can think of so far has been Donald Trump. I absolutely do not want him having power. However, binding administrative agencies' hands to Congress's whims will not fix that problem. Remember: this is a Congress that, by SCOTUS's own hand[2], has been turned into a political donation mill that occasionally moonlights as a legislative body. The cat-and-mouse game will run far slower with Congress being bribed by corporations to just conveniently forget to close those loopholes. And we don't even get an improvement on liberty for anyone else. There are plenty of ways in which the Presidency can absolutely roadkill you personally, without needing to invoke an administrative body with rulemaking authority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

[1] See also: Apple's response to the Digital Markets Act

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCutcheon_v._FEC

> In democracies, there is substantial or complete independence between the branches of govt — legislative, judicial, and executive

I don't think that's true at all, and I believe separation of powers is (to large degree) and Americanism.

I think most democracies lack or have very weak separation of powers, and are ruled under a principle of legislative supremacy.

That's pretty clear in the UK (where parliamentary supremacy is a bedrock principle of their unwritten constitution), and I believe in Napoleonic law countries there's no sense where a court can strike down a law as "unconstitutional," because I understand courts there aren't bound by precedent in the same way common law courts are.

Yes, and those are considered weaker democracies than where the separations of power are wider and stronger. It can also be observed over time, and the UK is definitely on a slide in the authoritarian direction, not necessarily unstoppable, but definite.

Again, also notice this includes not only branches of govt, but how the societal institutions maintain separation, industry, press, academy, religion, social orgs, nonprofits, sports, etc.

>If congress wants something regulated, they should pass a law and give guidance

I largely disagree. Congress did it's job in creating agencies and outlining their domain. I don't want a bunch of politicians creating regulation on drug approvals for instance, I want physicians and pharmacists doing that. I think the past few years have proven this, the supreme court, congress and executive fudging around with whether or not drugs are safe and efficacious has been a total shitshow.

Having professionals in their respective fields drive agencies is the only way you even come close to keeping up in the modern world. I cannot even imagine a world in which all agency policy shifts drastically every 2-4 years as different administrations come and go. That would absolutely wreck the US.

But it shift now every 4 years with the presidential election. Our system is based on congress writing legislation and the administration implementing that legislation. As it stands now agencies can disagree with their own previous rulings just because a new administration came in.

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