The Supreme Court weakens federal regulators, overturning decades-old Chevron decision

Hell I need a cold drink and I ain't talking about soda water...talk to yall Sunday, maybe.

 

I ,for one, welcome our new trillionaire overlords.

 

I swear I just thought of that earlier...

 

while I understand this is the piss-and-moan and oh-whoa-is-us thread criticizing the Chevron decision, here is how the other side looks at it. Ignore at your ongoing and continued peril.

link should work for everyone.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/suprem...83jbeb6kr61&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Two Big Victories for Liberty at the Supreme Court
The Justices continue their repair work on the separation of powers.
By The Editorial Board
June 28, 2024 at 5:50 pm ET

Friday was a good day, make that a great day, for liberty and the Constitution at the Supreme Court. The Justices delivered an overdue rebuke to overreaching regulators in a ruling that abolishes Chevron deference, while they also reined in prosecutors who stretched the law in pursuit of Jan. 6 cases.

In arguably the most significant decision of the year, a 6-3 majority (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) overturned the Court’s 40-year-old Chevrondoctrine that told judges to defer to agency interpretations of vague laws as long as they are “reasonable.” Now regulators will have a harder time bending laws, and Congress will have to legislate more clearly. Imagine that.

Chevron arose when judges were willy-nilly legislating from the bench, but its flaws were “apparent from the start,” as Chief Justice John Roberts explains for the majority. The doctrine lacked a constitutional basis and clashed with the Administrative Procedure Act’s command that courts “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions.” From the start, he says, Chevron was “a ‘rule in search of a justification,’ if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.”

The doctrine spawned confusion and conflict in lower courts, including whether a given law was ambiguous in the first place. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it five years after Chevron was decided: “How clear is clear?” The Chief says deference to regulators became “an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishing the basic judicial task.”

The High Court hasn’t invoked Chevron since 2016, relying instead on basic statutory interpretive tools and its major questions doctrine, such as in West Virginia v. EPA. “At this point, all that remains of Chevron is a decaying husk with bold pretensions,” the Chief writes.

The problem is that lower courts still rely on Chevron and cite it repeatedly to rubber stamp even the most dubious rules. See the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Court’s considerations about when to revere precedents also support its decision. Not only has Chevron proven unworkable, it “has undermined the very ‘rule of law’; values that stare decisis exists to secure,” the Chief stresses. As Justice Neil Gorsuch notes in a powerful concurrence, “these antireliance harms” aren’t “distributed equally.” While “sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities,” others may not.

Chevron “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.”

Lacking a strong legal rebuttal, the three liberal Justices fret about “judicial hubris” and the Court turning “itself into the country’s administrative czar.” “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Justice Elena Kaganwrites in dissent. “Judges are not experts in the field.”

But the progressive impulse to defer to the rule of experts is one reason Americans are so frustrated with government. Some judges may run off the rails, but then some do that now. The crucial constitutional point is that each branch of government stays in its proper lane.

***
Chevron’s defenestration will require judges to determine the best reading of statutes. The Chief demonstrates how to do this in Fischer v. U.S. Prosecutors charged a Jan. 6 rioter with violating the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, of all unlikely statutes.

The financial securities law makes it a crime to “corruptly” shred or conceal documents “with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” This provision is followed by another one punishing anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes” such a proceeding.

The government argued this catchall applied to the rioter’s obstruction. Six Justices disagreed. The catchall “was designed by Congress to capture other forms of evidence and other means of impairing its integrity or availability,” the Chief writes. He was joined by Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

It would be “peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress created a catch-all provision that reaches beyond the scenarios that prompted the legislation,” the Chief adds. The government’s “novel interpretation would criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists alike to decades in prison.”

The Court’s Friday decisions safeguard individual liberty against overreaching government. Isn’t that why the Founders fought the Revolution?

Appeared in the June 29, 2024, print edition as 'Two Big Victories for Liberty'.




​

 

Unelected bureaucrats inventing laws is unconstitutional. Why do you clowns love authoritarian governments?

 

What a moronic take. You want unelected government goons to decide our nation's laws instead of the PEOPLE through their ELECTED representatives. You truly are a MORON.

 

It’s challenging (it's impossible) for Congress to legislate every scenario, so laws often have some ambiguity. For instance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) broadly refers to preventive screenings, leaving it to the HHS to determine specifics. Similarly, IRS regulations outline general categories for Health Reimbursement, with details clarified by the IRS and HHS. The Securities Exchange Act allows the SEC to interpret insider trading within broad guidelines. Defense laws enable quick responses to threats, but without explicit details, actions may be delayed until Congress acts.

Previously, judicial reviews served as a check on executive overreach. This ruling seems to remove that balance, implying that anything not clearly outlined in legislation might not be enacted until Congress intervenes, hindering government function.

Am I understanding this correctly? This stance seems appealing to those who believe that either the government is inherently problematic and should be limited or that it has the potential to become problematic and should be restrained. (vs a stance that government is here for us, so let's make it work better for us)

 

I want appointed experts in their field to regulate that field based on elected officials from the citizens. Do you think judges with no expertise should decide the regulations?

 

I see that Jesus has brought you back to us. I’m so thrilled.

 

You are a lawyer.

You have no issue with @FranchiseBlade's patently false statement? Any first year law student who says such nonsense would deserve ridicule.

 

Which statement do you think is false?

 

@Os Trigonum already kindly tried to explain it to you.

 

https://manhattan.institute/book/the-unelected-how-an-unaccountable-elite-is-governing-america

 

I addressed everything brought up by @Os Trigonum

Either you can explain it or you can't.

 

additional commentary on the Loper Bright decision

The Supreme Court's Decision Overruling Chevron is Important—But Less so than You Might Think
It won't end the administrative state or even significantly reduce the amount of federal regulation. But it's still a valuable step towards protecting the rule of law and curbing executive power.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/2...s-important-but-less-so-than-you-might-think/

excerpt:

Despite the likely limited scope of its impact, I still think today's ruling is a valuable step. While it won't lead to large-scale deregulation, it can help strengthen the rule of law. It could also limit the aggrandizement of power by the executive. Liberals who lament Chevron's demise may be happier about it if Donald Trump returns to power and his appointees try to use statutory ambiguities to advance his ends.

A traditional rationale for Chevron is that courts should defer to agencies in situations where there are statutory ambiguities because the agencies have superior expertise. Justice Kagan repeatedly invokes expertise in her dissent.

Sometimes agencies really do have relevant specialized expertise. But expertise is far from the only factor influencing agency decisions. Partisan and ideological agendas also have a big impact.

If Trump returns to power, do left-liberal Chevron fans believe his appointees will scrupulously "follow the science" when they interpret statutes? Or will they have a political agenda that will usually trump (pun intended!) science when the two conflict? The answer seems pretty obvious, at least to me.

The same question can be posed in reverse to the dwindling band of conservative defenders of Chevron. Even if they think GOP administrations will "follow the science," they probably don't have equal confidence in Democratic ones.

Partisan and ideological bias aside, many issues handled by agencies are simply impossible to resolve through technical expertise alone. They also involve questions of values. And even the most expert of government planners have severe limits to their knowledge, which is one reason why it's usually best to rely on markets, which aggregate information better than planners do.

In sum, Chevron's demise doesn't entail that of the regulatory state. Far from it. But it's still a useful step forward.
​

more at the link

 

lol

 

here is the rebuttal to Sam's claim which is clear upon reading the decision:

Understanding Chevron's Death

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/28/understanding-chevrons-death/

excerpt:

Today the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3*, to overrule the doctrine of "Chevron" deference to agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises, consolidated with Relentless Inc.

The bottom line should be unsurprising to anybody who had been following the arguments or the Court's treatment of Chevron over the past decade. The only thing that was harder to tell was whether the Court was going to formally overrule Chevron, or announce a major revision to Chevron but retain the name. It went with the former course.

The logic is pretty straightforward. It is the Court's job to say what the law is, including saying whether an executive branch official or agency has exceeded their authority in a particular case. The APA says Court's should decide questions of law. And so courts should do their job, rather than give the tie to the agency in close cases. (That's not to say that there aren't both formal and functional arguments on the other side, I'm just describing the majority's logic.)

But there are three very important boundaries to the Court's holding.

First, the death of Chevron does not mean that the views of agency officials are irrelevant. If the theory is that they have expertise in questions that are relevant to the statute's meaning, they can still share that expertise and courts can still be persuaded by them. (This has often been called "Skidmore" deference, though I'm not sure the Court intends to retain that name either.)

Second, in many cases agencies will still have broad delegated authority. The Court agrees that in many cases the best reading of the statute will be that the agency has broad power, or that Congress delegated to the agency a bunch of decisionmaking authority. In those cases, the agency still gets great deference as to the exercise of that authority (within the bounds of the non-delegation doctrine and now the major questions doctrine).

[Side note: I'm sure there will be a ton of writing soon about the practical implications of these cases. What I would like to see is a decent approximation or Fermi estimate of how many of the most important regulations are justified on the basis of the interpretation of ambiguous language vs. the implementation of broad delegated authority. Today's cases imperil the former, but don't move the needle on the latter. What percentage of cases are in each category?]

Third, the Court says that under stare decisis, previous applications of Chevron deference are presumptively safe, because the fact that the interpretive framework has changed is not enough of a justification to overrule them. (I don't think Justice Thomas, or Justice Gorsuch, in fact share this view, though they purport to join this part of the opinion.) But of course new regulations and new agency actions may require "new" interpretations, and there will surely be lots of debate in the lower courts about the boundary between old precedents and new cases.
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more at the link

 

Elena Kagan’s scathing Chevron dissent highlights US supreme court’s disregard for precedent

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” Kagan wrote.

She added that the decision puts the courts at the center of a wide variety of policy issues, ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence.

“The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education,” Kagan wrote.

Roberts argued that “courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4745941-kagan-dissent-supreme-court/

So again according to both the ruling and descent opinions, the judicial branch decides.

You didn't even read the decisions, did you? You just thought you could argue. But you were wrong... Again.