What is the significance of this
(edited, originally mistakenly wrote "regulators" can still make laws, which is exactly the wrong thing)
/s
Deference for unintentional ambiguity seems unrelated, but in the real world people want to know where the lines are so they can respond accordingly. Not knowing where the limits are gets expensive for anyone not trying to push boundaries.
Lawsuits meanwhile are horrifically inefficient in terms of time. What exactly are people supposed to do while waiting for a lawsuit to finish? For some things sticking with existing guidelines works but nobody wants to make major investments when the underlying rules are about to change. Clarity is far more valuable than generally perceived and that’s what’s being destroyed here because the courts even decades to make the meanings of laws clear.
This decision is therefore directly and significantly harmful to the US economy.
We'll be fine, everyone. Nothing to see here.
For example, one of the cases that led up to this was due to the National Marine Fisheries Service forcing fishing companies to pay their monitors' salaries. The law established the monitors and their role, but it did not say that the companies must foot the bill.
With Chevron deference struck down; it's now possible to even get an Agency's administrative law sanity checked by the Courts.
No, which is why we want the people previously free to make top-down decisions, i.e. executive-branch agencies, to be subject to judicial oversight when attempting to read new powers for themselves into the law. Doing away with Chevron restores that oversight.
FDA can't shut down the factory. It has to take it to court.
A Judge with a JD or a jury of random people will decide if the factory can stay open.
Factory stays open.
Millions of people eat salmonella contaminated food.
Where do you find that the FDA cannot shut them down?
This is not about specific regulations, it's about the authority to write those regulations and where the boundaries are.
Chevron specifically says though that it should be within their authority and reasonable.
Taking your point however, I think congress will eventually be forced to act on this. We do need some deference to regulators, but that deference has been turned into legislative abdication. This decisions sets that right.
When congress is ready to write a law that gives greater deference to regulators they will. Until then, in my opinion, this was a proper decision of government restraint.
This is not the only case which will be brought to this court.
The point is to tie congress up, or make sure legislation passed is pro business.
The courts will defang the agencies. This will get you a repeat of 2008 and the bailout, and the net neutrality bill.
I don’t think I can support an objective idea that it’s “gone too far” when the decision was on ideological boundary. This was political activism not jurisprudence.
> The Supreme Court on Friday reduced the authority of executive agencies, sweeping aside a longstanding legal precedent that required courts to defer to the expertise of federal administrators in carrying out laws passed by Congress. The precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, is one of the most cited in American law. There have been 70 Supreme Court decisions relying on Chevron, along with 17,000 in the lower courts.
A huge win for democracy and freedom that both major US parties and all citizens should celebrate.
I'm the person who prefers having regulatory bodies handle matters over a dysfunctional and ignorant congress who is political about everything.
How is the supreme court beholden to citizenry? They have life appointments, they're beholden to no one (except exceedingly rich "friends" apparently)
Though I couldn't easily find any hard statistics, which may not exist for Hatch Act reasons or otherwise, I'd rate the current composition of the DC-centered civil service at around 70-80% Democrats; defense and intelligence a little lower, health and social services a little higher. If current trends continue, this will reach 90% in many agencies within a decade.
Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter. It is obviously not representative of the country as a whole, though that is only based on a rather shallow and one-dimensional analysis. However, it explains at least part of why this is happening.
Therefore, when civil servants are put into place from the other side, they can't complain.
I don’t think they lose the right to complain.
So then actually, yes the ruling was correct, and yes people are right to put this power back into the hands of congress, and out of the hands of civil servants.
Whatever terrible thing that someone would be complaining about in the future, it is mitigated by this correct ruling that helps stop that supposedly bad thing.
If you want to accept that position that I just laid out, then fine. You agree with me, but you would also be agreeing with the supreme court decision.
What have they done to earn my trust? Why would I choose to outsource critical decisions pertaining to my own life and affairs to strangers who are not meaningfully accountable to me and have no direct understanding of my values or interests, regardless of how well-intentioned they may be?
What possible reason could there be to give civil servants authority to make decisions that materially impact us without any oversight or accountability?
But yes, the fact that 99% of our government is made up of these people who are a few layers separated from direct political bullshit is why it functions at all.
We are much better off when these agencies operate autonomously and elected representatives can intervene when necessary instead of making them go back to the meat grinder to do anything.
The other issue of course is that the people leading agencies are playing politics just like everyone else. Do people not remember the controversy surrounding Ajit Pai's leadership of the FCC?
The difference is you vote for your legislators directly and can hold them accountable for their actions. For federal agencies, you're at best indirectly voting for them through voting in a presidental election, but mostly there's no accountability.
The entire purpose of the political (and judicial) process is to reconcile to competing interests and conflicting values of the wide variety of people who make up society.
It is a delusion to hold that the matters regulatory bodies are involved in are somehow entirely empirical questions with unambiguously correct answers -- in reality, there are normative questions, value judgments, trade-offs and conflicts of interest inherent in every decision point.
These decisions are political ones, and allowing regulatory bodies to make inherently political decisions for everyone else can only have the effect of entrenching one faction's interests and values at the expense of everyone else's.
Some lawmaker is going to call for dumping all PFAS into the local river for example.
But there's also a revolving door between the regulators and the companies they regulate. Sure, Congress is dysfunctional. But regulators are also flawed.
You've said this elsewhere in thread but you're making an idealogical claim with no supporting information. Congress is virtually non-functional, the court voted on idealogical lines, it only benefits one party to put more responsibility into congress.
So maybe 50% of the country should be celebrating?
I for one see a lot of problems with this ruling and the secondary and tertiary consequences it will cause.
And this ruling will result in a lot of the common good (limited resources like fish, air quality, etc) being trampled upon and becoming the profit of a couple companies, taking these goods away (sometimes irrevocably such as in the case of over fishing) for the generations of the future.
We need our regulatory bodies to be able to move faster because by the time congress might respond it will be too late.
Someone made the example of a factory that sells products for ingestion. If the regulator (FDA) doesn't have the tools to effectively protect the public of insecure foodstuff, who will? Consumers? Consumers will eat excrement if the price is low enough, because that's what's is available to them. Consumer power isn't vested in the consumers, it is vested in the regulatory agencies, since these have resources and expertise to recognize unfair, unsafe, anti-competitive, anti-consumer, etc practices, because unlike consumers, these have an advantage point of view, rather than the individual trying to find others with their same condition.
A huge win for corporations and corporate freedom that one major US party and all shareholders should celebrate.
Practically, the major effect here is to reduce the power of the executive (and of Congress to delegate to the executive) and increase the power of the courts.
Like many of the Supreme Court's actions, it needs to be understood in the context of the years of history of Congress being in an almost total state of paralysis, so decisions that nominally "kick things back" to Congress are of enormous significance.
The decision tries to say that this doesn't affect the solidness of the many many prior cases that relied on Chevron deference, but expect a flood of challenges to regulations in basically every field.
Now, if there is a lawsuit or other legal matter over widget usage, the court can take the Federal Widget Agency's interpretation of the law into consideration, but is free to rule however it sees fit on the precise interpretation of Federal widget law.
The more things like this happen, the more the function of government (and business, and relationship between labor and business) will return to the way they were operated in the US between 1880 and 1920.