Did they? I wasn't there. But a reversal of Chevron doesn't necessarily mean that the courts get to do what they like. It may mean that the courts simply get to gut the bureaucratic state and kick the can to Congress -- that what's not forbidden by statute is allowed rather than that the courts act as regulators. There will be lower courts who will want to push their role as regulators, but the SCOTUS seems uninterested in playing that game given its "major questions" doctrine.
It would be very strange for the court to create the major questions doctrine then impanel itself as the ultimate regulator.
Someone has to fill in the multitude of gaps that exist between a law and its enforcement. Chevron moved much of that decision-making authority out of the court system into the executive branch.
Even a fully-functional representative body can't write laws that are explicit enough to cover every possibility. And the U.S. Congress is far from functional.
This is a key point that gets overlooked so often.
The Court accepts that governments outsource regulation to e.g. the private developers of building codes. Similarly, we don’t benefit from a Congress mired in details over the minutae managed by many areas of the federal government.
It's not though. The only people that can apply it are the supreme court and the only time they'll apply it is when precedence and the letter of the law goes against their own political ideologies. In short, it's lazy judicial activism.
It's anti-textualist, anti-originalist, anti-legal theory. It's a rule that the Supreme court has to invoke to achieve their objectives because they have no other avenue. The law was clear, the intent clear, and what congress desired was clear. Major questions should be solved by congress passing a revision to the law. The supreme court invoking it robs congress of their power because "we know better".
The reason it's such a bad rule is no lower court or litigant can really invoke it. It is only something the supreme court can use because it's undefined what qualifies as a "major question". Boiled down, it's "we don't like the law congress passed but we can't come up with a constitutional, textual, or historic reason why that law or it's application is invalid".
They would not use "major questions" if there were any other legal reasoning to go to.
> The only people that can apply it are the supreme court and the only time they'll apply it is when precedence and the letter of the law goes against their own political ideologies.
Not really. First, any inferior court can also apply the major questions doctrine -- the SCOTUS is merely the final arbiter, but presumably in many cases either there will be no case (because the Executive will preemptively go to Congress) or the Executive will accept a lower court's decision w/o having to go all the way to the SCOTUS. Second, the doctrine is pretty clear: if the impact of a regulation is politically very controversial and its impact on the economy or liberty is quite large by comparison to more mundane regulations, then it belongs to Congress.
Since "major questions" has no concrete definition, this means each minor point can/will be litigated until the court determines whether that individual point is a "major question."
Quite arguably, Congress deemed the precipitating questions were not "major questions" and expressed as much by delegating to agencies.
> Quite arguably, Congress deemed the precipitating questions were not "major questions" and expressed as much by delegating to agencies.
That's a tremendous stretch because Congress can be very vague in its delegation of authority and decades later the agencies it delegated power to can interpret anything they want into that language and -because of the oft-repeated point about Congress' disfunction- the agencies can't be stopped.
> Since "major questions" has no concrete definition,
It's like obscenity: you know it when you see it. But it's simpler: if there's a controversy, there's a chance that the issue is a major powers issue, and then you have to look at whether the liberty/economic impact of the regulation is extreme enough that Congress must decide it.
It would be very strange for the court to create the major questions doctrine then impanel itself as the ultimate regulator.