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Comment by brodouevencode | Hacker News Reader

So if something that is seen as a bad idea should be kept in place because "that's the way we've always done it"?

Most of the decisions that get to the Supreme Court could reasonably be decided either way. If they were simple, clear decisions they wouldn't make it to the highest court after all. I don't necessarily think the original Chevron decision was the "correct" choice, or the "incorrect" choice, but it was the choice that was made and for 40 years Congress wrote laws and funded agencies on the assumption that that is how things would continue to work. If it had been decided differently all those years ago, then 40 years of laws would have been written differently. It's like the standard plug in the US. Was that the objectively correct choice for what a plug should look like? No. Is there possibly a better configuration that some other country is using? Yes. Would it be worth it to make the change now and make everyone in the country change all of their plugs and electronic devices? No.

In any of those laws Congress passed in the past 40 years they could have taken the opportunity to codify the original Chevron decision into law. So the fault for any disruptions or bad outcomes lies entirely with them. Voters who are unhappy with the situation should complain to their members of Congress.

Obviously an outright bad idea should not be kept around just because that's how we have always done it, but don't underestimate the value of predictability and stability. Society can't operates if laws change every day, even if it's driven by a desire to make the laws better.

"Obviously an outright bad idea should not be kept around just because that's how we have always done it.."

But who decides that? Laws do NOT change every day and I look forward to your examples of that. The problem is that laws are not changing, and legislators are depending on the courts to do the hard work for them.

> Society can't operates if laws change every day

Funny you should mention that. Gorsuch wrote the exact same thing while arguing in favor of overruling Chevron. You can find it by Ctrl+F-ing the string "though the laws do not".

> "Chevron’s fiction has led us to a strange place. One where authorities long thought reserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where the scales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the most powerful, where legal demands can change with every election even though the laws do not, and where the people are left to guess about their legal rights and responsibilities"

No but this is not a bad idea. Why should congress have to be experts and pass hyper specific laws for every aspect of a government agency rather than just deferring to experts?

Because those experts haven't been able to craft unambiguous laws that aren't up for interpretation. There's nothing stopping congress from deferring to those experts still.

If Congress lacks expertise on a particular topic then they can front load the process and seek expert input, then write that into the legislation. There's no need to delegate that to the Executive branch for interpretation after the law has been passed. This might slow down the pace of legislation, which would be fine.

The current pace of legislation is glacier slow

Which is fine. Legislation shouldn't be rushed, and the default should be to do nothing.

There should be a very high threshold for "we're pressing the reset button on a regulatory infrastructure built on decades worth of precedent, #yolo!", yes.

> There should be a very high threshold..

there's no higher threshold in the US than a US Supreme Court decision

The Court's threshold for doing this should be higher than this decision implies.

To paraphrase Linus: If it's a bug that people depend on then it's not a bug- it's a feature.

By this logic, slavery was a feature and not a bug.

New laws can be passed to put new policy into place and change those long-standing things explicitly.

it's funny how progressive turn into conservatives, as though we need to cement whatever happened in the 70s

things clearly took a turn for the worse since then in many fundamental ways specific to the progressive "revolutions"

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