Just like congress can legislate abortion laws rather than leaving it to judicial precedence.
Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with the position of supreme court to push the responsibility of lawmaking back on congress.
It would literally be impossible for congress to make a law covering every single nuance agencies are tasked with. This Supreme Court knows it. This is nothing more than deregulation on a scale not seen in modern American history. When you can’t find clean drinking water in 30 years, this will be why.
The statute (APA) requires courts to form an independent judgment about the gaps.
The Chevron doctrine required courts in certain cases to set this judgment aside in favor of an agency’s judgment—-basically on the basis that the agencies are closer to the problems and know better.
This setting aside may be the better outcome, however it is not explicitly specified in the statute (APA).
Ultimately, if Congress wants this to be the case, they /can/ amend the statute (APA), effectively enshrining the Chevron doctrine.
At the end of the day, the court’s decision here rests on statutory interpretation (not constitutional doctrine) so Congress could change the outcome by amending the statute (APA) to explicitly codify Chevron. This would be achieved with its ordinary legislative power (Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution).
The court’s decision does effectively put the ball back in Congress’ court.
What does that even mean? Supposedly these agencies already know what they're tasked with, no? If not... well I mean that's straight up irresponsible.
The other part of this I don't get is that people have been complaining about the "Revolving Door" problem in these agencies for a long time now. They're not sacred, and further we know they're not sacred because we've been complaining about their corruption. So why pretend they're sacred now? Why are there no solutions?
The problem with a lot of the called "progressives" is that they've adhered to a different kind of conservatism, where while the ideals are progressive, every single instance of actually implementing those ideals are conservative and play to old power structure.
Where are the progressive iconoclasts?
> What does that even mean? Supposedly these agencies already know what they're tasked with, no? If not... well I mean that's straight up irresponsible.
It means the supreme court just gutted the agencies ability to make and enforce regulations. The agencies have lots of experts who know what they're supposed to be regulating they just aren't allowed to do that in many cases now. Unless congress writes things explicitly into law you can expect legal challenges to just about any regulation the agencies try to put forward.
> The other part of this I don't get is that people have been complaining about the "Revolving Door" problem in these agencies for a long time now. They're not sacred, and further we know they're not sacred because we've been complaining about their corruption. So why pretend they're sacred now?
Why do you think these two issues are opposed? The answer to weak and lax regulation isn't to remove the ability to regulate.
> Why are there no solutions?
What solutions are you proposing? Do you think your solutions have any chance of getting anywhere in the current political climate? Who benefits from the status quo and how much effort will they put in to block a solution?
Ultimately I hope everyone that shares this sentiment really tries to introspect, read what they write/say, and see how deeply flawed the arguments are. It directly leads to strategic blunders.
In all honesty what does it really take for people to see the reality of their situation?
The left no longer has any will whatsoever, no courage, no real "revolutionary" spirit at all. It is decrepit, meek, and unwilling to change because it's paralyzed by fear (and that's being generous). It has no real political positions that people are demanding, because those political positions are in direct opposition to the majority of the players within the party that claims to represent progressives/left. It doesn't. It's a Conservative Party that has progressive talking points.
That is not how you run anything. That's not how you run politics, that's not even how you live a life. Don't let fear of failure mean complete inaction.
Taking risks is absolutely paramount, otherwise those at the margins willing to take risks, will eventually win out.
What this decision means is that Sierra Club, NRDC, etc., can now litigate in the Ninth Circuit and push for more favorable interpretations of environmental laws. And the next Republican administration can’t take that away, the way they could under Chevron, which allowed agencies to change their interpretation of the same law for no reason.
It's unrealistic to expect agencies to implement flawless regulations, especially when they're often underfunded. Complex situations will always have loopholes, but letting corporations exploit them freely doesn't benefit society. Sure, agency overreach can be a problem, but in this case, I think the lack of regulation is more concerning.
> The problem with a lot of the called "progressives" is that they've adhered to a different kind of conservatism, where while the ideals are progressive, every single instance of actually implementing those ideals are conservative and play to old power structure.
I agree with your point about the conservative/progressive labels. People's views are nuanced - they might want to maintain the status quo on some issues, push for progressive change on others, or even revert to past practices. It's not black and white, even though we feel that way cause our society is getting more polarized.
I don't even see why such a law would have to name any agency. It could be a generic, "yes Supreme Court we do intend to let the executive fill in the blank in the law through regulations - that's why we call them regulations".
Even if that failed (perhaps on constitutional grounds), they could periodically accept agency regulation revisions and pass them into law.
Chevron, of course, was a case where the Reagan EPA interpreted the word "source" in the Clean Air Act to refer to an entire plant, rather than a distinct pollution source. The D.C. Circuit, in a decision written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, disagreed with the EPA's interpretation of the law. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that the EPA was empowered to resolve such ambiguities in the text of the statutes.
Up until now, companies had to cannibalize their customers when they could no longer find legal ways to grow. This will be enshittification like we've never seen. Instead of cannibalizing their customers, corporations will be able to cannibalize and exploit everything else that isn't explicitly nailed down in legislation.
In essence, this is likely the next Citizens United: another massive power grab for corporate America, the richest, at the expense of the people who populate the country.
If you can find clean water in 30 years, it may be because reasonable judges were not required to defer to the environmental science of the Trump EPA. Chevron was imposed in the first place to help the Reagan EPA narrow environmental regulations.
In any case the vast majority of judges will probably keep deferring to the regulators in most cases. They aren't forbidden to, they're just no longer required to.
If Congress thinks they shouldn’t have to do the work of legislation, then they can all quit and we can elect people who are willing to do the job we elect them to do.
What's that I hear you say, he won't do it because it would hamper him personally? Well, bless his heart!
SCOTUS hasn't had a real originalist in like 200 years.
Plus Marbury is too inside baseball for it to get reversed via constitutional amendment.
If we're going by a strictly textualist interpretation of the Constitution then this is the only valid option, barring a Constitutional Amendment to actually give the power of judicial review to the Supreme Court.
Is it absurd and insane? Yes. But so is determining law by in essence conjuring the ghosts of dead men.
You mean the precedent liberals used to completely and un-democratically reshape the American republic in the mid-20th century—everything from taking religion out of schools to deciding that towns couldn’t shut down strip clubs “because free speech?”
Conservatives will 100% take you up on overturning Marbury.
"Why, the very idea..."
Also, when those executors of the law are determined to be the sole arbiters of what the law means without any appeal or restraint, then the “they are experts” ideal has been mistaken for reality.
Imagine if the courts deferred to the police way more, because they are experts on what “crime” really is and know what the written law should be interpreted to mean. Oh, and let the police be the judges and run their own courts, too.
Let’s try it like this: “If Congress doesn’t like how police implement the law they are free to pass laws to clarify their intent. They don't need unelected and unaccountable Justices to do that for them.“
The whole problem is that without that branch of separated power, the police/federal agencies can do whatever they want, regardless of what the law says. Congress could pass new laws every year that say things like “No, we really meant it, police can’t randomly arrest people and keep them in jail forever.” But there wouldn’t be any way to judge whether they are doing that.
Meanwhile, you need to brush up on your civics knowledge. The authority to command the armed forces is directly under the executive, which is why the President is the “Commander in Chief.”
In other words, these are not problems, either in the real world way things work (like the EPA has problems now after this decision) or in a constitutional sense.
Congress directs some times and defers other times. Congress absolutely does not direct every pentagon spending program.
> The authority to command the armed forces is directly under the executive
The EPA is an "executive department" as described by article two of the constitution the same as the department of defense. If the founders expected congress alone to execute executive authority (except in the special case of the military) then the constitution would have been written that way and the EPA would have been created as a body that reports to congress. Congress was obeying the constitution when they created the EPA under the president, just as they were when they created every other executive department.
The argument is not that the EPA should report to Congress instead of the President. The argument is that the EPA should be limited to doing what the laws Congress passed actually says. It is the executive branch’s responsibility to implement the law, not create, implement, and judge cases like they have been doing.
I'll never understand this bullshit stance "democrats cant do it because then maybe republicans will do it later" ... i mean how does not doing it ever stop republicans from doing it anyway later lol... this stance is what has fucked democrats for decades, this obliviousness that republicans have no issue jumping directly to extremes, like saying ROE was settled law and then overturning it in a fucking massive partisan ruling.
On top of everything else, Roe was an aberration internationally. When Macron criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for overturning Roe, he got the French people to approve an amendment to add an abortion right to the French constitution. Of course, French courts wouldn’t just gin such a right into existence from thin air, because they’re not lawless. I don’t know if anyone picked up on the irony of that.
The real chumps are Republicans. They should appoint justices that will create the conservative version of the Warren Court. Adopt Democrats’ preferred “emanations from penumbras” standard for interpreting the constitution. I bet you can find some cool stuff in “emanations from penumbras” of the second amendment, the contract clause, etc.
There is no literal reading of the second amendment that grants gun rights to individuals outside of well regulated militias.
They lied to fucking congress
Or I mean, a different outcome is that we get EPA court. Article III is very short and doesn't design the federal judiciary. Biden could pretty easily just make the EPA a court with lifetime appointments. What an own goal that would be haha.
thanks!
But Congress did it anyway, and the SCOTUS has over the years upheld it. There was a landmark court case involving Chevron (the oil company). SCOTUS ruled there saying that the executive branch agencies responsible for rulemaking are experts in their fields, and we should mostly defer to them when their position seems reasonable, and when Congress hasn't passed a law that contradicts what they want to do.
Marbury is a much older case, that made precedent the idea that courts have the ability to strike down laws that they believe violate the constitution.
The current conservative-leaning SCOTUS is skeptical of what conservatives call the "administrative state" (basically: rulemaking done by the executive branch). They seem to not be a big fan of "Chevron deference", and are fully willing to exercise their Marbury-affirmed power to strike down executive actions that they don't believe are constitutional, or don't believe directly stem from laws Congress has passed.
SCOTUS invented the Chevron doctrine because it believed at the time courts were too quick to second-guess the logic behind agency rule making, and in doing so unnecessarily and improperly inserting themselves into technical debates as well as broader political debates. IOW, the court was primarily concerned with people using the courts to subvert executive prerogatives and electoral politics. The concern now, apparently, is that administrations are using agency flexibility to subvert electoral politics.
Then and now, by moving the threshold for when courts can second-guess federal agencies, it's effectively altering the rights and responsibilities between Congress and the President, as well as between those two institutions and the electorate more broadly.
That's very charitable. A less charitable view might be that their concern is that regulatory bodies and other executive agencies are standing in the way of personal and corporate profits, and that overturning Chevron means that the courts can now cripple the ability for federal agencies to function by overruling the reasonable interpretations of statute those agencies have been operating under all this time and instead limit them to only the most narrow interpretation of the law. Law that has, for decades now, been being written under the assumption that Chevron exists, and not with the expectation that an adversarial judge will try to undermine the intention of the laws being passed.
I doubt it. I think most people have some federal agency they aren't a huge fan of. Sure, the fact that Chevron helped to allow the EPA keep your air and water from being poisoned by greedy corporations who would do it in a second if it would make them more money helps to make it a more sympathetic cause, but it's not as if people aren't aware that the defense applied to every other agency too.
> I wouldn't want the default assumption of the courts to be that when the law is unclear, whatever the sheriff or the highway patrol decides is illegal this month is
That isn't a fair characterization of the situation. Even forgiving that the police aren't a federal agency, first a question around the legality of what the police were doing would have to reach the court in the first place, then the court would have to determine that an ambiguity in the law existed, and then the court would have to decide if the interpretation of the law that the police has been using is reasonable and only if it wasn't would the court impose its own interpretation. That seems pretty fair even in the case of the police.
It's not about deferring to the enforcers of that law. It's about deferring to the law first, and only imposing a narrower interpretation if the enforcers of that law were already out of line. It just means that agencies aren't limited to the most narrow interpretation of the law as written.
There are of course federal policing agencies, such as the DEA, ATF and FBI, but it doesn't matter because the point wasn't about federal agencies as such. It was about deferring to the enforcers of a law about what the limits of their powers are, which just seems like a terrible idea at all levels of government.
Was the FBI spying (and more) on civil rights leaders part of their powers as federal law enforcement officers executing their duties? I have no doubt they would say so, and absent a specific law from congress telling them they couldn't, who is to argue that they were unreasonable? Surely we should defer to them as they're the experts in their field right?
If the secret service started shutting down cell towers within a 10 mile radius of presidential rallies, well that's just common sense protection against remote explosives and well within their directive to protect the president right? They are the experts on this after all and have wide latitude to do what's necessary. No need for the courts to review that action or the laws surrounding it.
It's a fantasy to think that this will mean state spying powers will be reduced.
> absent a specific law from congress telling them they couldn't, who is to argue that they were unreasonable?
The courts are! They always have been, even under Chevron. If at any point a judge thought that the FBI, ATF, DEA, NSA, or <insert three letter agency here> interpreted the law unreasonably, or extended their authority beyond what was allowed that judge had the power under Chevron to impose the court's own interpretation of the law on that agency.
The Chevron defense said that if the court agreed that an agency had an interpretation of an ambiguous law which was reasonable and permissible the court couldn't impose a more narrow standard on them. Because it's been overturned it now doesn't matter if the court thinks that what the agency was doing was reasonable and permissible, the court can inject it's own interpretation anyway.
Chevron prevented the court from forcing the most narrow interpretation of the law on a federal agency in cases where the court couldn't justify doing it. That's it. Now that protection is gone and I promise that it's not going to make you more free or better off. It means that any and all of the rights and protections you have today thanks to federal agencies are at risk of going away as soon as a case goes in front of an activist judge
Never said that it would, I said allowing enforcers to set the extent of their own powers is a bad idea.
>Chevron prevented the court from forcing the most narrow interpretation of the law on a federal agency in cases where the court couldn't justify doing it.
Federal agencies (indeed any government agency) should always be subject to narrow interpretations of the law when the extent of their authority and powers are in question. If that interpretation is too narrow for Congress, then Congress needs to be more explicit about their intent. The law needs to be as clear as possible. Ambiguity is a flaw not a feature and the fact that ambiguities can lead to problems means we should make better law, not throw our hands in the air and let whoever's in charge this week decide what the policy is. If we want a massive federal agency to oversee something then the extent to which that agency is empowered and what that agency is empowered to do had better be explicitly spelled out.
The law, in most cases, is about the practical application of an ideal (the law) to reality (the case).
If things weren’t so lopsided and blatantly partisan, then yes, the theory would matter. It would probably be a prosaic and boring decision.
This court is not only engineered to lean heavily in one direction, it is also being fed cases based on that common agenda.
In addition - we cannot avoid ambiguities unless we have powers of foresight that make the entire governing edifice irrelevant.
No one could predict the capabilities or failures of this generation of LLMs for example. There is no better “law”, unless it is an act that gets updated on a near monthly or quarterly basis.
This is a timeline that a congress is not suited to manage. This is definitely something that an agency of some sort would.
Finally - Saying that bureaucrats and experts are biased, but to leave out the bias of the courts feels unfair.
What’s more, these agencies—particularly the ATF—love to make up, out of whole cloth, completely new rules that are contrary to their own previously-expressed rules that have the effect of retroactively turning millions of law-abiding people into felons overnight.
In the original context of the 1984 Chevron case, environmentalists were arguing that the EPA had redefined "source" in an overly narrow way, much narrower than Congress had originally intended in passing the Clean Air Act, thereby enabling companies to emit more air pollution. The Chevron decision was seen at the time as a loss for environmentalists and win for the corporate sector and conservatives.
It's funny how the tables have turned – a decision which was originally praised by conservatives and condemned by liberals and environmentalists, eventually ends being condemned and overturned by conservatives, while being defended by liberals and environmentalists. Both the 1984 case and the 2024 case had a conservative majority, and were perceived at the time as furthering conservative political objectives.
I think what's really happened: in 1984, the federal judiciary was widely perceived as liberal-dominated, while the federal bureaucracy was seen as relatively more conservative, so liberals wanted the judiciary to be more powerful than the bureaucracy, conservatives wanted the opposite. In 2024, the situation is reversed: now the federal judiciary is perceived as being increasingly dominated by conservatives, while the federal bureaucracy is viewed as being more liberal, so now liberals want to defend the bureaucracy's power against judicial encroachment.
It looks to me like the only thing that's constant here – on both sides – is "the ends justify the means".
> the useless rent seeking politicians and their cronies.
Courts are largely politically appointed. Why are judges necessarily more trustworthy in your opinion?
My real opinion is that no one is more trustworthy than the other. They're all people. But there are constitutionally delegated duties given to each branch that we've gradually eased over the past century, and between Jarkesy disallowing in-house courts for certain types of crime, the resurgence of the non-delegation doctrine and now the overruling of Chevron, SCOTUS thinks this delegation is not optional. I personally agree with them hesitantly, but predicting the future is hard, and there are some actions they take where I think the consequences are obvious, but this is not one of them, and I would have slept no more or less soundly if this case had come out the other way.
Also worth noting is that the head of the EPA at the time was Anne Gorsuch, mother of Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, sided with NRDC. But the Supreme Court reversed, ruling in favor of the EPA (and Chevron). The Supreme Court said that the court had to defer to the EPAs interpretation of the word “source,” even if the court thought that wasn’t the best interpretation of the law.
By "long ago" the delegation was first mentioned (AFAICT) in 1825:
> It will not be contended that Congress can delegate to the Courts, or to any other tribunals, powers which are strictly and exclusively legislative. [23 U.S. 1, 43] But Congress may certainly delegate to others, powers which the legislature may rightfully exercise itself.
* https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/23/1.html
There hasn’t been a successful nondelegatiom challenge in like a hundred years.
However it's also very unlikely that Congress will pass Chevron into law, and the text they might write might be narrow enough to pass constitutional muster, so until then this is a purely academic question.
Which is actually possible to do by amending the US Constitution, but good luck with that.
But in practice, to non-lunatics, stare decisis (the legal principle that says not to overturn, or even consider, topics that have already been decided in the past without an extremely good reason) is an incredibly important prior to bring into any discussion. If the court actually uses its power to completely rewrite the rules of how government works on a whim - and let's be clear, that's what this decision does - then there's no way for anyone to ever make a plan. Nothing is stable.
Unfortunately, at least 5/9 of the current Supreme Court are either lunatics or blatantly corrupt. Chevron was decided unanimously for a reason. There is no way to administer a modern state without that concept - which is why right-wing extremists are so happy to see it gone, because they don't want the state administered.
Interestingly, the ability to declare a law un/constitutional is not an enumerated power given to the court by the Constitution. The Supreme Court declared that power for itself in Marbury v. Madison and people have just went with it ever since.
Marbury is an utterly natural consequence of the Supremacy Clause and Article III (and the context of common law).
The constitution declares itself as supreme law. See the Supremacy Clause:
This Constitution, and the Laws of
the United States which shall be
made in Pursuance thereof; and all
Treaties made, or which shall be
made, under the Authority of the
United States, shall be the supreme
Law of the Land; and the Judges in
every State shall be bound thereby,
any thing in the Constitution or
Laws of any State to the Contrary
notwithstanding.
No, it’s to decide cases and controversies [1]. Deciding on constitutionality flows from that.
This case, for example, was decided more on the Administrative Procdures Act than on the Constitution.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/
I'm not convinced you are right. If you look at the conservatives on the current SCOTUS, they aren't monolithic. Thomas and Alito are hard conservatives (with Thomas the hardest), [0] and I'd expect they'd likely do as you suggest and strike down any statutory attempt to reintroduce Chevron as unconstitutional.
But I'm not sure Roberts would be willing to go along with that. As the most moderate of the conservative justices, he was comfortable striking down Chevron on statutory interpretation grounds, repeating that on constitutional grounds might be going too far for him. And he only has to convince one other conservative to go along with him, and with the support of the liberals he'd have a majority. Kavanaugh is only modestly more conservative than Roberts, so he'd be the most likely candidate. I think, if Roberts was to overturn on constitutional grounds a statutory attempt to reinstate Chevron, he'd prefer to do it in the narrowest way he could – striking down that particular attempt, but leaving open the possibility that Congress could have another go at it.
The other thing you have to keep in mind, is ultimately the justices are individuals with their own idiosyncrasies, and they don't always vote the way you'd predict if ideological leanings were the only factor driving their decisions. A good example of that was the Fischer v United States case [1] from the other day, in which SCOTUS sided with January 6 defendants: Jackson joined the conservatives in that, whereas Barrett joined the liberals in dissenting.
I suppose Jackson siding with the conservatives was not entirely surprising; as the most moderate of the liberal justices, she is the most likely to join the conservatives in any case. Barrett's dissent was somewhat more surprising, given she's not the most moderate conservative, with Roberts and Kavanaugh siding with the liberals more often than she does.
[0] https://www.axios.com/2019/06/01/supreme-court-justices-ideo...
Congress can't actually legislate anything while it's held hostage by obstructionists and there's effectively zero chance that a bunch of republicans who want to dismantle the already inadequate regulations that keep entire communities from being poisoned will vote to remove their power to do exactly that through the supreme court.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
There will always be some number of petty people who don't care what the costs are as long as "their team" isn't allowing the "other team" a win, and those who don't want the federal government doing anything other than war, but when our government shuts down most American's aren't very happy about it. Most have a list of things they'd like their representatives in Washington to be doing for them, and they don't view the obstructionists acting like toddlers preventing those things from happening very favorably.
In the end, a partisan pissing match doesn't actually help the American people and our government should be working for us, not sitting on their hands doing nothing while the American people suffer and backslide. As long as election results are entirely divorced from approval ratings congress has zero incentive to work for the people though and they can get away with preventing the government from being functional/useful for anyone but themselves and the people stuffing their pockets.
I know a lot of them. And it's how the system was designed, by the way. Congress was supposed to generally be weak and deadlocked unless an overwhelming majority of people wanted something.
> The overwhelming majority of people do want a lot of things.
While the language is close these aren’t the same. Specifically the parent is saying that people need to want the same thing. Claiming that people want lots of things with no consideration of what they are or even how the things are done falls far short of the goal.
> the fact that the Senate gives Wyoming and Vermont the same power as California and Texas prevents that.
Have you considered that our founding documents/government was structured this way on purpose? It was a major incentive for encouraging small states such as Wyoming to join the union. Without this mechanism for giving smaller states an equal influence relative to other states many would not have joined the union.
The senate was modeled on the house of lords and the expectation was that the country would be mostly ruled by the representatives in the lower house, with the senate handling special things like impeachment.
The senate disproportionately representing smaller states was a compromise necessary to get smaller states to ratify the constitution. Wyoming and Texas didn't exist. Senate rules that turn it into the place were legislation goes to die (like the filibuster) are rules created by the senate to give itself more power.
It was not. Rules that make congress "weak and deadlocked" are mostly not in the constitution. For instance, the filibuster is part of Senate rules and could be changed at any time.
Party-line votes and deadlock in the house are mostly driven by partisan politics and party discipline.
The constitution specifies a few things that require a super-majority (impeachment conviction, overturning a president's veto, and constitutional amendments). Everything else is supposed to be a majority vote of 535 independent representatives.
You're assuming a lot more agreement WRT "doing their jobs" than actually exists.
I want X, you want not X. We both want Congress to "do its job", but what, exactly is that job?
Deadlock is when I don't get my way.
To govern. That means compromise. Maybe we disagree on X and our representatives decide to do Y instead which doesn't full satisfy either of us. Maybe they pass X which I want while you don't, and in return they pass Z which you want while I don't.
It's not as if the idea of a congress that can work together is an impossible dream. The situation today is the exception and not the rule. For all the problems congress has had we're seeing historic levels of dysfunction and that shows in the total lack of productivity https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/118th-congress-track-become-...
California has spent over $100bn to build 1600 ft of high speed rail over a decade. And it wasn't Republican obstructionists who caused that.
There are too many regulations.
I'm not familiar with that specific situation. Was it taken to the federal courts and only allowed to happen because of Chevron?
> There are too many regulations.
I think many people cheering this ruling are just anti-regulation and they care a lot about that without thinking much about how this ruling will negatively impact their lives and the lives of their families.
I agree with you though. There really are too may regulations. That will probably always be true. As long as industry and corporations can write self-serving legislation and bribe people in congress to pass it, there will be regulations on the books that shouldn't be there. That said, regulation is the only reason you have safe electricity, clean air, and safe water (assuming you aren't one of the several millions of American's who currently don't have safe drinking water).
Regulations, like all laws, are just tools and they can be used to help improve our lives, preserve our health, promote the safety of the American people, and increase our freedoms or they can be used to stifle competition, funnel tax money into the pockets of private corporations, or restrict our freedoms. Like laws themselves (which there are also too many of) it would be foolish to abolish all of them because some of them are bad.
We should be paying attention to who is writing and passing regulations and who those regulations serve, then hold people accountable when they don't represent our interests. That's hard to do in our current system where people's votes don't mean much, so we might want to try fixing that situation first but being "anti-regulation" makes about as much sense as being "anti-laws". Laws are a good thing. Regulations are a good thing. Let's just try to make sure they are both serving the public good.
I think calling people who oppose your policy ideas “obstructionists” is a neat ad hominem, as if the only reasonable position is yours.
What you’re lamenting is that you can’t force an agenda without people agreeing — and when they refuse to agree with you, your agenda can’t happen. While you say “most Americans”, factually, you lack a majority for your agenda: you’re a minority trying to impose itself.
That’s democracy.
It would be, except that I never actually said that. Plenty of people can disagree with me and not be an obstructionist. A person in congress can even vote against something I'm in favor of and not be an obstructionist. Obstructionists are something very different from just being "people I don't like"
> What you’re lamenting is that you can’t force an agenda without people agreeing
No, it's certainly not about "forcing an agenda" it's about functional governance which by necessity involves compromise and a willingness to give and take. It's not even always about "agreeing". An obstructionist will vote against their own policy ideas to prevent letting their opponent get their way.
> While you say “most Americans”,
I mean most Americans. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans want congress to work and they don't like the government shutdowns obstructionists cause.
> but factually, you lack a majority for your agenda
That's incorrect too. While obstructionists can stand in the way of policies that divide the American public there are also situations where a policy has majority support but is still held up or prevented by obstructionists. If we lived in a country where the approval rating of senators indicated their likelihood of getting elected you might have a point, as obstructionists being elected and re-elected would indicate that the majority of the people support them and their tactics. That's not the country we live in however. For just one example, notable obstructionist Mitch McConnell is the least popular senator in the entire country. He has no reason to stop being an obstructionist though, because how the people feel about him doesn't impact his ability to keep his job.
That's not democracy, it's just what happens after many decades of efforts to weaken democracy and erode the ability of the American people to have a meaningful influence on policy and who gets into office.
Those same polls show they believe their own representative is doing an adequate job - which is my point:
There’s no “obstruction” there, just frustration that your faction doesn’t have the votes to achieve your desired policy because some groups don’t agree with you.
> there are also situations where a policy has majority support but is still held up or prevented by obstructionists
Policies overwhelmingly favored by the majority of Americans are generally blocked by establishment candidates — at a rate far higher than “obstructionists”.
> He has no reason to stop being an obstructionist though, because how the people feel about him doesn't impact his ability to keep his job.
People he doesn’t represent can’t impact this job — correct.
And again, we’re seeing that you’re just upset by democracy itself: that you can’t force representatives on people and accordingly, can’t achieve what you want without their support.
Your entire post was nothing but deranged bashing of political rivals when you can’t achieve you policy objectives due to their opposition.
"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this - it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done."
You can just say you don’t like democracy.
Again, from Mitch McConnell - "If I'm still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those things are going to pass the Senate. They won't even be voted on. So think of me as the Grim Reaper: the guy who is going to make sure that socialism doesn't land on the president's desk."
He's the same guy who refused to even start the confirmation process of Obama's supreme court justice pick a year from the end of his term. The GOP rejects compromise as a strategy, and does not even pretend to secure coalitions.
Also, this feature also works the other way: If Congress were to pass, say, abortion guarantees or Chevron Deference into law, then good luck trying to get them repealed. See also Obamacare, which hasn't been repealed after it was passed despite hell being raised.
Instead, they basically give the side that controls parliament the ability to pass legislation, and if they fuck it up, they can get thrown out and another party has their turn - this is essentially exactly what is happening in the UK with the Conservatives getting kicked out of power.
The problem with this "eternal gridlock" is that, since Congress can't pass anything, basically the executive branch and the Supreme Court take over legislative roles, which I'd argue is worse. I.e. the executive branch makes a ton of executive orders, which if challenged get decided by the Supreme Court, basically leaving Congress out of it nearly entirely because that legislative body is so feckless.
Let's see how long that lasts now. Overturning Chevron was a step to that very end. It puts the Department of Health & Human Services on the chopping block.
Did you miss the hundreds of billions of dollars of legislating the Congress did this year?
The list of acts of the 115th United States Congress includes all Acts of Congress and ratified treaties by the 115th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2017, and ended on January 3, 2019. The 115th Congress enacted 442 statutes and ratified 6 treaties.
The 116th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2019, and ended on January 3, 2021, enacted 344 public laws and zero private laws
The 117th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2021, and ended on January 3, 2023, enacted 362 public laws and 3 private laws.
The 118th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2023, and will end on January 3, 2025, has enacted 65 public laws and zero private laws
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_115th_Unit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_116th_Unit...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_117th_Unit...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Unit...
When everyone is in agreement, congress is not being held hostage by obstructionists and some things can pass. When obstructionists are in disagreement, they can prevent anything from passing.
If you optimize for seat count then a wave election can easily turn many of those seats over to the other party, and with them control of the House.
If you optimize for seat safety then a wave election need only turn over a few of your seats to switch control of the House.
We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. Three of those are in the past 20 years. Four in the past 30 years.
Gerrymandering isn't all it's cracked up to be. It cannot make any party impervious to wave elections.
This, anyways, only as long as all House districts in each state have roughly the same population.
I think the last 15 years of elections would seem to contradict you.
My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
Wave elections are a thing, but as we've seen, they don't give a the waved party a massive margin.
> We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010
2010 is a bit of a magic number, because that was the point when Republicans started their concerted, coordinated, country-wide gerrymandering campaign. So I don't think elections prior to then can support or refute any points about gerrymandering.
The republicans would then find it necessary to change the constituencies to which they appeal. Anyhow, a few states are horribly gerrymandered by the democrats. The problem is that democrats did so horribly during the Obama years midterms that most states ended up in control of republicans for the 2010 and 2020 census.
You do know that, in the seven House elections since 2010, republicans won the congressional popular vote four times: https://ballotpedia.org/Proportion_of_each_party%27s_nationa.... They won 1-6 million more total votes. Republicans will almost certainly win the House popular vote this year too.
I’m deeply curious how you formed the belief that democrats would consistently win without gerrymandering. That’s obviously not true even if you look at polling, which obviously isn’t affected by gerrymandering. Democrats are 0.5 points ahead on the generic congressional polls, but republicans were 2.5 points ahead last fall. RCP clocked them 2.5 points ahead in 2022 (actual was 2.8).
They already had done that, and they lost two big wave elections. (E.g., Texas redistricted in 2004.)
It'd be better if the electoral boundaries were drawn with a polling-naive algorithm, but that isn't how it works in practice - you've probably noticed that every election is knife edge and there are regular upsets. This is because if one party is guaranteed to lose it will change its policies just enough to attract marginal voters from the other party.
For example, there were confident predictions of a similar nature that the Republicans would be unable to win elections because of the shrinking white demographic. We can see in the polling that what actually starts to happen is Trump still on the ballot but they've been in a long strategic process of picking voters from non-white demographics. The elections themselves are still knife-edge.
There'd be a different policy mix, but one thing we can predict about the future anyway is that there will be different policy mixes. Gerrymandering just privileges minority incumbent policies.
It really isn't. It's self-perpetuating. A gerrymandered state might _eventually_ switch sides, but far more likely it'll become more red (and yes, gerrymandering is predominantly a Republican tactic).
Here's a nice overview: https://medium.com/rantt/the-top-10-most-gerrymandered-state...
Democrats before ‘67 were racist as hell. Their southern strategy in ‘67 destroyed the party. Non racist republicans merged with the non racist democrats into the DNC. Racist democrats, pushing the southern strategy, left the DNC and joined the Republican party.
However, now it's pretty much only Republicans who rely on computer-aided models to gerrymander the districts.
There _are_ Democratic examples, and the worst ones are in Maryland and Illinois. But they pale before the Republican gerrymandering.
On (1): needing the approval of the senate, house, and president makes it very hard to pass laws.
On (2): the senate rule requiring 60% approval has already been repealed for appointments and for budgetary legislation, but it really needs to thrown out. The first two years of Biden’s presidency were mostly lost to obstructionism because of this rule.
On (3): this will most likely be banned if democrats get a trifecta federal control, and repeal (2), since gerrymandering primarily just benefits republicans.
One could argue, similarly to overturning Roe, they're diverging from a very critical precedent which is going to trigger a flurry of lawsuits over the next couple years
They begin with "The stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established,..." and proceed to find the considerations "all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go"
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
If you read the decision on abortion, you will find they spend significant time arguing that stare decisis underpinning Roe v Wade is not valid.
There's no harm from denying somebody an abortion when they're not pregnant.
There are a myraid of ways that roe vs wade could've turned out and in the final ruling document they'd all fit the correct format.
> [2] McCorvey gave birth to a daughter at Dallas Osteopathic Hospital on June 2, 1970
At that point she lost standing similar to another Jane Doe whose case became moot because she already had the abortion [1] and the desired action (injunction against an abortion) is irrelevant because it's already happened.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-issues-dec...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#History_of_abortio...
What would such a law look like?
Let's pretend we're in congress and want to pass a law limiting pollution in lakes and rivers.
One option would be to have a bunch of experts tell us what we should explicitly ban and write those into the law. This option would mean we need to revisit the law every few years as the science changes and new harmful chemicals are developed or identified.
If instead we want the agency to be able to adapt to new situations, how do we word it in a way that won't be overturned? Congress is in charge of legislating. When does writing rules for what is and isn't pollution cross the line to legislating? Can congress turn any of that power over to executive branch agencies without a separation of powers argument coming up?
I have some views on this supreme court and believe they're driven by ideology and not a consistent legal framework. Even if you believe they are completely impartial how would you protect these laws against a future court that may not be?
Changing the status quo on a fundamental de facto government structure is not good judiciating.
I am not saying I agree with it or condemn it - rather stating the path forward.
I too would like congress to start acting the part. They have the tools.
But a more important point - is that congress is a tool of democracy itself and is a reflection of the attitudes and desires of the populace. If populace no longer has the aptitude to apply its rights to elect the government that serves its interests - then it will experience the consequences of such negligence and learn from them, which is also its right.
Refusing it that right is something much worse - authoritarianism when an individual or a group gets to pick winners or losers.
Remember when Obama won? The Republican Party was at a morale nadir, and they rallied together under the banner “1 term president”. They fought every single thing.
Mitt Romney had to oppose his own Medicare plan, which the democrats adopted so that they could find common ground.
Obama winning was probably the last gasp of the system working as it was intended. There are plans upon plans to ensure the system can never do that. That agencies are weakened, courts are stacked, local elections won, media narratives perfected. It’s tempting to say this is to ensure the “libs” lose, but that only plays back into a narrative and camouflages the issue.
Effective, logical government is itself the problem.
I think that someone is paying attention to the details, to the org charts, to the minutiae of laws, and making a coordinated effort to move things in a single direction.
I dont think what you described counts as idealism anymore.
But Obama was still one of a very few options Americans had the opportunity to elect. He ended up in the primaries largely without the involvement of the vast majority of the country. My point isn't that things don't get better, just that we don't get a lot of choices, politically.
(Though if Trump wins this fall, and the right succeeds in their plans for their government "makeover", I think that will set back the "things getting better" train for decades. Hell, our hard-right SCOTUS majority is already unraveling that.)
Isn't the fundamental structure that the legislative branch writes laws, the judicial brand interprets laws, and the executive branch enacts/enforces laws? That's what I was taught in school.
I don't doubt that this is a political move to shift power from a liberal presidency to a conservative supreme court. But to me it seems like a case of the right thing done for the wrong reason.
Or, if you become less partisan, you may see that it is the right thing for the right reason.
> How bad is the problem? Take just one example. Brand X concerned a law regulating broadband internet services. There, the Court upheld an agency rule adopted by the administration of President George W. Bush because it was premised on a “reasonable” interpretation of the statute. Later, President Barack Obama’s administration rescinded the rule and replaced it with another. Later still, during President Donald J. Trump’s administration, officials replaced that rule with a different one, all before President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s administration declared its intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time. Each time, the government claimed its new rule was just as “reasonable” as the last. Rather than promoting reliance by fixing the meaning of the law, Chevron deference engenders constant uncertainty and convulsive change even when the statute at issue itself remains unchanged.
If his complaint is that there's an executive discretion in executing the law or the expectation should be that congressional force only goes as far as its ability to write micromanagement into statute then it's hard to restrain from making "do you even constitution bro" or "who are you and why are you wearing that robe" remarks.
(Of course, in representative government, not only elections but agency and judicial appointments have consequences, so while it it may be inconsistent for justices to exercise that privilege for themselves while arguing away the right of another branch to do the same, it is not that big of a surprise, and it is entirely consistent with a philosophy based in elitist privilege for some that is likely behind much of today's ruling among others.)
Additionally, it's far from clear the examples reviewed were representative vs written to support the conclusion, so in addition to the problem of how variance is framed as a bug rather than a feature, it's not even really clear how much is actually occurring.
"Elections have consequences" is a well-known phenomena, and the idea that a branch other than the legislature might have influence over how the law is interpreted or executed shouldn't be news to anybody, least of all a member of the judiciary, many of whom will in fact be no doubt less qualified to make judgments vs agencies with specific technical and legal expertise.
It doesn't matter if the example is representative. It doesn't matter if it is 1%, 10%, or 50%. If agencies are able to act as a political branch and use Chevron as a cover to make these political decisions immune to judicial review, then the system is broken and needs to be fixed.
This is like defending qualified immunity for police by saying "well the arrests you presented where the police used the QI defense to cover over egregious rights violations are not a representative sample of all arrests made by the police."
And part of the point of institutions like courts is that the reasoning is subject to public review and discourse, both institutional and social.
I'm making a specific response to shortcomings apparent in the argument -- the opinion seems to treat the fact of differing interpretation of law or differing policy goals between different executive administrations to be some kind of bug or worse a surprise, when it seems entirely reasonable to expect it as a feature, one that certainly shouldn't be surprising to someone whose whole career (and indeed, features of this very decision) turns on the interpretive range often present within the law.
If you have specific commentary indicating how experts from a conlaw round table might engage this response, by all means, don't "just let slide", enlighten all of us in the course of doing the work that people genuinely combating Dunning-Kruger might do by elaborating on what, specifically, is overlooked in the response or missing from its counterargument.
So, for "specific commentary", me, a regular dude, can see straight through them. If you wanted a real, deep Roberts-quality response, you're in the wrong place. None of what you said was even presented in oral arguments, because two of the finest lawyers in the world could also see through that pretentious fallacy filled drivel, and knew that the 9 justices, all of whom are also leagues ahead of you or I in legal knowledge and skill, would equally scoff.
McConnell blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland for 293 days arguing that there was not enough time before the election.
Then, somehow, they turned around and passed through Amy Coney Barrett in 35 days, instead of following the same precedent of waiting for the election.
The hypocrisy is blatant and disgusting.
If you are actually a programmer, figuring you why Garland wasn't a precedent for ACB wouldn't be hard. You just conveniently left out an 'if' statement in your analysis
Amy was nominated September 2020
Go ahead and inform the class why we didn't have enough time for the appointment in March but did in September.
LOL. It's like taking someone seriously who wants to build my web stack on fortran.
We've gone through significant uncertainty and convulsive change as a result of the Supreme Court throwing out decades of precedence. This isn't to say this is always a bad thing, but the reasons for their past few decisions do not pass muster.
That's sort of the point, because congress has abdicated their responsibility for so long, many of the "laws" and "rights" that exist in our legal framework are mere shadows of actual legislation. They're executive whims or judicial policies, both of which are inherently fragile and subject to sudden change. Roe v. Wade was the "law of the land" only to the extent that the courts continued to interpret an ambiguity in the law the same way as they always had. Congress had decades to shore up a case that even the jurist who were part of it said was extremely weak. Everyone knew it was fragile and the DNC cashed in on that fragility every election.
Or consider medical marijuana, which is currently only un-prosecuted at the federal level because the president told the DEA to chill out for a bit. The fact that in November the next president could change their mind and conduct federal raids of dispensaries across the country is not a good thing. You might argue that they couldn't do that because the medical marijuana industries and laws are crafted to avoid crossing state lines, but that depends on A) ignoring decades of Wickard (which admittedly the current SCOTUS might be willing to do, but boy if you think this decision or Roe was controversial, that would be a doozy) and B) ignore the very obvious fact that some of that legal supply is leaking across state lines illegally.
The fact that Net Neutrality is on again/off-again is another example of this. Major legal decisions are being left to the whims of two octogenarians who it's a miracle manage to get through the day without shitting their pants, and a judicial system that is inconsistent at the best of times. The courts have always been political, but if they are uniquely so at this time, it's because the folks interested in politics have figured out its easier to get what they want via executive fiat and judicial wrangling, and congress has learned their jobs and income are more secure when they don't have to take the blame for those things.
And he's ok with this, because his political ideology is such that fewer regulations and less rulemaking is a good thing.
Ultimately Congress cannot take on all of the executive branch's current rulemaking authority without some huge changes to how the body works. Those changes will not happen, because conservatives don't want these rules.
That might violate the 10th Amendment since it wasn't explicitly delegated to the federal government.
I guarantee you that if Congress passed a law codifying Chevron, this same Court would overrule it on the grounds of some other doctrine they just completely made up in their minds, most likely the major questions doctrine ("MQD"). These self-described "originalists" (side note: "originalism" was invented in the 1980s) just completely made up MQD to justify overruling clear language by Congress if the issue was subjectively large enough. It was used to overrule clear authority given to forgive student debt, for example.
I don't think you understand just how much of a power grab this Court has engaged in, which is funny because its supporters who are the same people who complain about "activist" liberal justices. MQD has essentially usurped the power of the other 2 branches of government whenever they see fit.
Example: in the case yesterday when SCOTUS didn't understand what corruption was they said Congress had had the opportunity to clarify since 1986 and they chose not to so deference should be given to that inaction.
Well, Chevron was decided in 1984 and no administration took action in the last 40 years. Where's that same deference?
The Democrats can be faulted for not codifying Roe v. Wade but I guarantee you that, even if they had, it wouldn't matter. Thsi Court would've found some justification to overrule that. Deference to the states, that sort of thing.
There is no fundamental princples in play here. It's entirely results-oriented.
Actually they can't. They can only pass legislation that involves interstate commerce or spending. See https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10787
(Because they can decide what is constitutional or not)
Edit: I have more questions but for some reason I can't reply to your replies :(
With the current makeup of Congress, it is unlikely so the USSC holds significantly more effective power than if it had a functioning Congress.
The two-thirds threshold you mention is for Congress to propose amendments.
Edit - wow this is actually true. From white house.gov:
> An amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose. The amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the State legislatures, or three-fourths of conventions called in each State for ratification
Kinda weird to ask, when the answer is five seconds away plugging "US constitution amendment process" into a search engine.
> wow this is actually true
Not sure why you're so surprised about it; consider that the threshold for overriding the president's veto of a regular bill passed by Congress is a two-thirds vote from both the House and Senate. It seems like the bar for amending the constitution should be higher (significantly higher) than that.
Besides that, not involving the state governments at all when amending the constitution feels like it would be a bad move, in a country founded on the idea of strong state leadership and a comparatively weak (though not as weak as some of the founders wanted) central government. Certainly our federal government is even stronger power-wise today than even the more strong-central-government proponents among the founders would have expected.
In a well-designed system, both have power over each other. That is certainly true in the United States.
The idea in US constitutional law is one of balance: we have three branches of government, and each are granted powers that can act as a check on the powers of the others. It's far from perfect in practice, but the intent is good, I think.
There's throttling to prevent rapid back-and-forth commenting as that can devolve somewhat; might be that. Try clicking the "X minutes ago".
Congress can absolutely limit judicial review by statute. (It can’t remove it entirely.)
Such a law would bypass Constitutional Separation of Powers (with limited privileges and immunities) i.e. checks and balances.
Why isn't the investigative/prosecutorial branch distinct from the executive and judicial branches though?
No, Article III § 1 explicitly vests judicial power “in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish” [1].
> Why isn't the investigative/prosecutorial branch distinct from the executive and judicial branches though?
What do you think executing laws means?
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/#ar...
To interpret what was meant by Liberty and Equality as values, as a strict constructionist.
The Constitution literally says the Congress has the power to establish inferior courts. Congress setting what is justifiable is highly precedented.
The words “separation of powers” never appear in the Constitution. It’s a phrase used to describe the system that document establishes.
I'm having a great deal of difficulty understanding how you got from "Congress may establish inferior courts" all the way to "Congress has the power to exclude its legislation from judicial review, including that of the Supreme Court itself, at its own prerogative". Could you explain this chain of reasoning?
> The words “separation of powers” never appear in the Constitution. It’s a phrase used to describe the system that document establishes.
Yes, no one argued otherwise. Separation of powers is indeed established by the Constitution, regardless of what specific terminology is used to explain the concept.
Congress may not delegate right-granting privileges because the legislature hasn't right-granting privileges itself.
The Constitution is very clear that there are to be separate branches; each with limited privileges and immunities, and none with the total immunity of a Tyrant king.
A system of courts to hear offenses per the law determined by the federal and state legislatures with a Federal Constitutional Supremacy Clause, a small federal government, a federal minarchy, and a state divorce from British case law precedent but not common law or Natural Rights.
And so the Constitution limits the powers of each branch of government, and to amend the Constitution requires an amendment.
Why shouldn't we all filibuster court nominations?
Without an independent prosecutor, Can the - e.g. foreign-installed or otherwise fraudulent - executive obstruct DOJ investigations of themselves that conclude prior to the end of their term by terminating a nominated and confirmed director of an executive DOJ department, install justices with with his signature, and then pardon themselves and their associates?
The Court can or will only hear matters of law. Congress can impune and impeach but they're not trained as prosecutors either; so which competent court will hear such charges? Did any escape charges for war crimes, tortre without due process, terror and fear? Whose former counsel on the court now.
What delegations of power, duties, and immunities can occur without constitutional amendment?
Who's acting president today? Where's your birth certificate? You're not even American.
What amendments could we have?
1. You cannot pardon yourself, even as President. Presidents are not granted total immunity (as was recently claimed before the court), they are granted limited Privileges and Immunities.
2. Term limits for legislators, judges, and what about distinguished public/civil servants who pick expensive fights for the rest of us to fight and pay for? You sold us to the banks. Term limits all around.
3. Your plan must specify investment success and failure criteria. (Plan: policy, legislative bill, program, schedule,)
Can Congress just delegate privileges - for example, un-equal right-granting privileges - without an Amendment, because there is to be a system of lower courts?
For 40 years, legislation was drafted under the assumption Chevron deference was going to be used to interpret the text of the bills. Now, all of those laws mean something other than what the authors intended.
If this was software, it'd be the equivalent of changing post-K&R C language semantics in a backwards incompatible way, and just saying "Well, if programmers care that industrial control systems are literally burning factories to the ground, they can just fix all the software that was written since 1984. Also, moving forward, we reserve the right to keep making intentionally-breaking changes to the compiler, so during the rewrite, they should take future planned-but-currently-secret semantic changes into account."
That the court is allowed to exercise power not enumerated anywhere is a major problem, just not a new one. We really should have legislated their role centuries ago.
They could--but in the case of the Administrative Procedures Act, which is the law relevant to this case, they didn't. Indeed, as the Court's opinion points out, they did the opposite: the Act explicitly says that the courts shall interpret the law when doing so becomes necessary to resolve a case.
Note that this actually limits the scope of this ruling in a way that does not appear to be recognized by commentators. The Court here is not saying that Congress can no longer pass a law that explicitly grants interpretive power to an executive branch agency. It's just saying that Congress did something different with this law.
Congress has already done that. Conservatives don't like that, calling the result the "administrative state". A very strict interpretation of the constitution could suggest that Congress cannot actually delegate legislative powers to executive branch agencies, and the conservative members of SCOTUS are (unfortunately) free to take up that interpretation.
Congress should get its Act together, but one group acting in responsible is not license for another group to act irresponsible.
Tell me you're not a lawyer without telling me you're not a lawyer.
And the court could simply invent more utter nonsense to toss it out again.