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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

For an unelected panel of judges to come in, above the agencies, and tell them how the president is allowed to enforce laws is a perversion of the constitutional order and separation of powers—and a repudiation of democracy itself.

It's a curious take. My understanding is that it is curbing the ability of the executive to issue laws (by calling them regulations), ie congress is not allowed constitutionally to delegate its law issuing powers away. So the power for the executive to issue new laws has to be extremely limited. State agencies officials are as unelected as judges. Congress cannot vote that an agency can issue any rule it wants for the environment for instance.

I know it is frustrating to have to go through congress to make changes but that's the very definition of democracy, the progressive accumulation of power in the hands of the executive is not.

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That's a misunderstanding of Chevron. Chevron said that if an agencies interpretation of the law was reasonable, it was deferred to. It did not let agencies do whatever they fuck they wanted unchecked.

What the SC just said is in the case of ambiguity, it's a coinflip how it'll go based on the whims of the court you land in (or more accurately, which one you bribe)

It's neither reasonable nor feasible for Congress to make fully thorough and ambitious-free laws for regulators to enforce. That line of argument is in bad faith, there's no "returning authority to Congress" here.

All the Supreme Court has said is that Courts must wrangle with the question themselves instead of auto-deferring. If a case is important enough, the State can escalate what they consider a bad call to the Supreme Court for clarity.

A judge who habitually makes bad calls and clutters up the docket is going to get a lot of attention, real quick.

Which is a power grab by the courts. Instead of deciding if the agencies interpretation was reasonable, they now also decide if they like the decision in the first place.

More power to the court == power grab, this is pretty straightforward. Especially when combined with the decision that judges can be legally bribed.

The core issue is that the Masonic trilateral structure - legislative, judiciary, & executive - is showing its age. The problem is fundamentally structural.

We have generally unqualified representatives drafting ambiguous regulatory laws that then need to be interpreted by some entity, whether the courts (whose expertise is law) or the agencies (whose expertise is not law).

There are two related difficult problems in governance models: entrenched bureaucracies and security services. Specialized tasks that require professionals who can naturally form a political block and subsequently political will and clout. However their responsible roles are by definition 'professional'.

I think we need to start thinking of a more modern political structure, specially in light of communication and information technology available. This debate over who is overreaching and who gets to get bribed or what ideological faction will get to interpret is a futile endeavor.

The core issue is 'legal and political consensus that is informed by expert insights'. As an example (to get you thinking) more 'real-time' engagements between different branches of the system could address all of the issues that SC or its decision opponents are arguing about.

I'd argue a much more core issue is simply the primitive voting system guarantees a two-party system. The US desperately needs ranked choice voting which would inject diversity into the system, diversity that's necessary for survival.

Any political structure is going to fail when you have a duopoly. One side decides to not play "fair" and bam, everything falls apart. You need to avoid any individual party having full control in the first place. Then the checks and balances can actually function.

That would be a component of a more modern system but I remain convinced that static functional groupings are systemically erroneous. Arguably the entire political parties approach is boneheaded as well. Entrenched structures and groups. How do we prevent this from happening while insuring sane collective governance with reasonable continuity. That is the question.

The texas rocket docket sure gets plenty of attention, but that hasnt done anything to slow it down. It sounds nice to say "well if things dont work out we'll just fix them" but the reality is that its much more likely that we will just fall into a new status quo of things being worse.

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