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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

I used to feel this way, and I can't quite identify the totality of what shifted my position, but now I parse this as "we just need to motivate congress" and it feels wrong.

The American system has always been full-throated adversarial -- and extremely successful. The historical system of legislature could delegate, and if the delegation went bad, the judiciary could intervene, rather than the legislature has to intervene in every bit of administrative minutae.

Analogy would roughly be...idk, the CEO has HR handle pencil procurement. HR, over the years, used this to interpret they could swap in mechanical pencils, erasable pens. But the new CFO tells the board this has to stop, the CEO is responsible for signing off on expenses. And then the employees say this is a good thing, that'll get the CEO more involved. But the CEO is already involved, just busy with other things.

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The problem aren’t interpretative courts, its unclear laws.

The pencil example is all fun and games, but swap « buying mechanical pencils » with « sending people to prison », and then it makes more sense why some people prefer the judiciary branch to constrain the power of HR when there’s ambiguity.

It's pretty much impossible to write a statute to account for every single possible situation and interpretation. In one county where I live we recently had a huge kerfluffle over the county code section about a ferry and ferry fares and what kinds of things the farebox can be spent on. At one point there were three different rewrites of the same statute, all purported to accomplish the same goal, and all markedly different depending on which motivated entity wrote the proposal. At any rate someone still would have needed to interpret the statute.

The reasonable course of action is to pick one of the three rewrites that codify a proposed interpretation of the currently ambiguous rules.

What would be unreasonable is to give those 3 options to a judge and ask them to do a coin toss on which one is right, and then let it sit that way.

I may be radical in this, but I wish the judiciary could force the legislative branch to decide on what the law they wrote means.

Indeed. What's happened fairly recently is that the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society have realized this and concluded that they can define the future of the country by strengthening the judiciary rather than trying [the much harder task] of making congress functional. It's working great, and even though this started further back it only became blatantly obvious to outsiders what was happening with the Trump presidency.

The CEO example is intended to demonstrate why "ah good, this'll make the legislature more active" may be too simple.

I'd also prefer a more practical example to argue with.

IMHO my shift on this is due to the practical examples seen over the years, legislature delegating to an agency they create, with judicial review, ends up being a good thing.

I'm honestly unaware of any unjust rule-making that ended up unfairly trampling someone, much less whip-lash back and forth.

And more importantly getting the CEO involved in pencil procurement prevents the CEO from handling business development tasks that would bring in tons of mechanical pencil money. So it's penny wise but pound foolish.

What about this ruling stops Congress from explicitly granting interpretive power on some aspects of a law? The default now is implicit interpretive power, this ruling flips it.

The Constitution explicitly delegates interpretation to the Courts. Just as execution is delegated explicitly to the Executive, and Legislation is delegated explicitly to the Legislative.

Anything passed by the legislative that tries to end run that delegation is simply not even a law. The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land. What is explicit within it overrides everything else.

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