How much authority/jurisdiction does this judge/ruling have? It seems like the kind of thing that might easily get appealed and lost.
The next step in this case is for a 3-member panel of the NLRB (a 5 member board appointed by the President, currently with 4 members) to decide whether to accept the proposed ruling of the ALJ or to substitute their own opinion of how the case should come out.
Orders of the NLRB are not self-executing, so parties can appeal an adverse judgement to the Circuit of Appeals of their choice and the NLRB can cross-petition for enforcement of their decision. The Federal courts have final say over questions of law like “are non competes a violation of labor law”.
The entire process takes several years to play out.
There's an open controversy about how much deference the Article I courts in administrative agencies are owed by Article III courts, arising mostly from Chevron v NRDC. That decision requires Article III courts to defer to Article I courts' interpretations of their statutes and even their administrative rules except in extreme circumstances. Several justices on the Supreme Court find Chevron deference problematic, but it currently is the law of the land.
It's not even sort of the beginning. The conservative stance on the role of the Supreme Court has been pretty clear for a long time and this court has been ruling that way for a few years now.
Their theory is that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets. The precedent that they've overturned has consistently been in line with this logic: they've said over and over again that if America wants a law then Congress should create it, rather than relying on executive rulemaking that gets overturned every time an administration changes or on unelected judges legislating from the bench.
Whether or not you agree with them on specific issues, I think we can all agree that the current status quo where worker rights take dramatic swings every time a new party takes control of the presidency is a ridiculous situation that needs to be fixed. I want a nation of laws, not a nation of administrative rules that have a 4-year shelf life.
Edit: Make that at least three times: they've also capped the civil service which has just caused an explosion in contractors.
Legislating from the bench is better than the administrative rulemaking in that it's at least generally more stable, but I do think that the conservative justices have a point that the actual laws should be more directly accountable to the people than the Supreme Court is.
Basically, we should be able to change the laws, but it shouldn't be as simple as winning a single national election because that makes things too unstable.
The best systems in practice seem to be proportional-representation parliamentary ones. They generally result in coalitions of multiple generally centrist parties so things don’t change too abruptly, but passing new laws is at least possible. Of course some parties refuse to cooperate with each other: in Germany for example no mainstream party will work with the right-wing AFD, and right-leaning mainstream parties additionally refuse to work with the left-wing Die Linke (legal successor to the East German ruling party although substantially more moderate nowadays). However this doesn’t stop the big mainstream parties from working together to an extent that would be unimaginable in the U.S.
It’s indeed probably impossible to fix in the U.S. because it’s so hard to amend the constitution in such a radical way.
When there are two major parties each representing say ~45% of the population, proportional-representation gives the left over swing voters equal power does it not? So perhaps ~6% of swing voters can have as much influence as ~45% of voters? Does this not happen in practice? Consider Israeli proportional-representation system for example. The Israeli % numbers are different but I have the impression they struggle with this problem due to proportional-representation.
There are ten factions represented in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) and the biggest one (Likud, Netanyahu's party) got 23% of the vote in the last election.
It's true that fringe parties can have outsized influence in a proportional system, but the US system suffers from the opposite problem: fringe elements can take over one of the major parties, which seems to be well on its way to happening with the Republicans now.
To some extent this already has happened, just at the State level, and I think a patchwork of stable state laws is still better than a bunch of very short-lived rules at the federal level.
The IRS exemptions for fake Christian seemingly organizations: do you think the court is going to defer to the IRS’s interpretation of the 3 word “exclusively for religious” part of the 501(c)(3) if it denies something Christian tax exemption? No. They’re going to see if that woman’s husband is a member of the Federalist Society, and if he is, then her bullshit charity that pays her salary will maintain tax exemption. My dude, Clarence Thomas’s wife is a beneficiary of deference on 501(c)(3).
They like administrative deference when it suits them. Don’t try to make this about some sincere judicial opinion that has some legitimacy.
Everyone says this about their opposition. Obviously you know that it's not true about the liberals—you know that they mean what they say. So when a conservative says that liberals are insincere and really have a hidden agenda you know that's nonsense.
Turns out that that the same thing is also true on the conservative side. They generally really do believe what they say. Donald Trump is a notable exception, but even many of his supporters are sincere and are either stupidly taken in or see him as a means to a good end.