[peterwwillis]

> They are being used to force through a policy that is not supported by either legislature or executive. That's not a function of a proper court.

They're asking the court to reverse the repealing of legislation, with the argument that the FCC should not have been allowed to repeal it because their legal reasoning was flawed.

Who is pushing policy? Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation? Was the FCC pushing policy by repealing it? Are the states pushing policy by trying to get the repeal revoked? Yes, Yes, Yes. Welcome to government.

It's all about pushing policy, any way you can. The system regulates the ability to push policy by allowing you to push policy, within the confines of the system, and gives you the tools to continually push or pull policy.

> Your side may temporarily win, but when the other side does the same, you end up with the broken system where nobody respects any decisions and the only thing that matters is which side you're on.

I re-watched the film Lincoln recently. It's basically about pushing for the 13th Amendment, well before it was politically tenable to adopt it. Bribery, back room deals, switching allegiances, concealing moves, political pressure, manipulation. Politics is the art of doing anything you possibly can to advance your agenda, to the exclusion of others' agendas. Your side doesn't even matter, it's what you can gain or lose that matters.

[paulddraper]

> the FCC should not have been allowed to repeal it because their legal reasoning was flawed

I have not been able to pin this down.

What law/rule did the FCC allegedly violate?

[openasocket]

Check out the NY filing for more complete information about their arguments (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/nn_govt_petitioners_br...). But the short answer is that the FCC is being accused of violating the Administrative Procedures Act.

The APA was created in response to the growth of government agencies tasked with creating regulations, essentially to curb the power of bureaucrats. Agencies are required to keep the public informed about possible changes to regulations and to allow for public participation, but what's relevant to this case is the process by which proposed changes are approved. In order to change the existing regulations, there has to be a formal review process, which involves gathering evidence and making a decision based on that evidence. Essentially, agencies like the FCC can't just change their rules on a whim, they have to look at all available evidence and actually come up with an argument for why the change needs to happen based on that evidence. Agency heads still get a decent amount of leeway, but standard is that their decisions cannot be "arbitrary and capricious." That's a legal term with a whole body of precedent behind it, google for more info.

I should also point out that suing based on the APA has come up a lot in this administration. My girlfriend is involved with environmental lobbying groups, and a number of the EPA rule changes proposed under the Trump administration have been thrown out because they did not properly follow the APA. The DOJ's repeal of DACA is also currently being challenged as violating the APA.

[paulddraper]

> they have to look at all available evidence and actually come up with an argument for why the change needs to happen based on that evidence.

Make sense. Proving this seems like it would be an enormously uphill battle.

It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC. (Otherwise, the court essentially becomes the FCC by upholding/overturning any "wrong" decision.)

Given that it only became a policy recently, and the current amount of debate...it's hard to believe that the court would decide that not having NN is egregiously in the wrong. But we shall see.

[dragonwriter]

> It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC.

The court—in an APA challenge—is not addressing whether the decision is right or wrong, but whether the process by which it was arrived at was complied with the legally-mandated process. Whether the decision is wrong (ambiguously or not) is beside the point, though that might be relevant to a challenge on other bases.

[openasocket]

Remember that the FCC has to explicitly provide their reasoning for making their decision. Those bringing this suit don't have to prove that not having NN is egregiously wrong, they just have to prove that the reasoning the FCC gave is egregiously faulty. It is a difficult battle, but not as hard as you might think.

[lovich]

Especially if the FCC points to things like the provably false public comments they collected as their reasoning. When they say use evidence like https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755251 it's not hard to prove that they didn't actually have reasoning for their decisions beyond "me and my lobbyists wanted it"

[droidist2]

Wow, apparently that comment was taken from some kind of boilerplate. Who comes up with this stuff?

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755250

[smsm42]

> Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation?

Yes.

> Was the FCC pushing policy by repealing it?

Yes.

> Welcome to government.

There's no problem with either Obama's executive or Trump's executive pushing their respective policies. People elected Obama, people got Obama's policies. People elected Trump next, people got Trump's policies. That's how it should work. The problem is when people are unhappy with Trump's policies and try to use courts to declare that only one side of the issue is legal and another is illegal. That's not how policymaking should work.

> It's all about pushing policy, any way you can.

Not in a proper government. In a proper government, courts should not be for pushing policy. If you want your policy, convince people to elect you and then enact the policy. Otherwise there would be no stable government possible - the Republicans would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Democrats, and Democrats would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Republicans, and it will always be about which team wins and never about getting anything good done. We're almost there anyway, but it's not a good thing, and there's no reason to make it even worse. Even if that means sometimes your team doesn't win.

> Politics is the art of doing anything you possibly can to advance your agenda

Why not murder your political opponents then (say you could get away with it at least long enough for the policy to be enacted?) Why not fake mass casualty terrorist attacks in the name of your opponents? Why there should be any rules at all? I think you'd agree there's some place where we'd like to draw the line. I'd want the line to be at using legislature for lawmaking and courts for enforcing laws.