I used to feel this way, and I can't quite identify the totality of what shifted my position, but now I parse this as "we just need to motivate congress" and it feels wrong.
The American system has always been full-throated adversarial -- and extremely successful. The historical system of legislature could delegate, and if the delegation went bad, the judiciary could intervene, rather than the legislature has to intervene in every bit of administrative minutae.
Analogy would roughly be...idk, the CEO has HR handle pencil procurement. HR, over the years, used this to interpret they could swap in mechanical pencils, erasable pens. But the new CFO tells the board this has to stop, the CEO is responsible for signing off on expenses. And then the employees say this is a good thing, that'll get the CEO more involved. But the CEO is already involved, just busy with other things.
The problem aren’t interpretative courts, its unclear laws.
The pencil example is all fun and games, but swap « buying mechanical pencils » with « sending people to prison », and then it makes more sense why some people prefer the judiciary branch to constrain the power of HR when there’s ambiguity.
It's pretty much impossible to write a statute to account for every single possible situation and interpretation. In one county where I live we recently had a huge kerfluffle over the county code section about a ferry and ferry fares and what kinds of things the farebox can be spent on. At one point there were three different rewrites of the same statute, all purported to accomplish the same goal, and all markedly different depending on which motivated entity wrote the proposal. At any rate someone still would have needed to interpret the statute.
The CEO example is intended to demonstrate why "ah good, this'll make the legislature more active" may be too simple.
I'd also prefer a more practical example to argue with.
IMHO my shift on this is due to the practical examples seen over the years, legislature delegating to an agency they create, with judicial review, ends up being a good thing.
I'm honestly unaware of any unjust rule-making that ended up unfairly trampling someone, much less whip-lash back and forth.
Indeed. What's happened fairly recently is that the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society have realized this and concluded that they can define the future of the country by strengthening the judiciary rather than trying [the much harder task] of making congress functional. It's working great, and even though this started further back it only became blatantly obvious to outsiders what was happening with the Trump presidency.
And more importantly getting the CEO involved in pencil procurement prevents the CEO from handling business development tasks that would bring in tons of mechanical pencil money. So it's penny wise but pound foolish.
What about this ruling stops Congress from explicitly granting interpretive power on some aspects of a law? The default now is implicit interpretive power, this ruling flips it.
The Constitution explicitly delegates interpretation to the Courts. Just as execution is delegated explicitly to the Executive, and Legislation is delegated explicitly to the Legislative.
Anything passed by the legislative that tries to end run that delegation is simply not even a law. The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land. What is explicit within it overrides everything else.
Yesterday would you have said "Whats the problem? If congress disagrees with what the executive did to fill in the blanks in their laws, they just need to pass new laws."?
I have only grade school understanding of the branches but I was taught the executive branch is supposed to enforce what congress decides with laws which this reversal seems to support.
Congress is like the product manager and creates something like the URS (user requirements specification).
The executive branches like the developer team that has to Turn those high-level requirements into detailed implementation plans.
The judiciary is typically the quality assurance and auditing team. They make sure that the executive branch hasn’t gone way past the initial requirements and they also check to make sure the initial requirements make sense and don’t cause other problems.
I think you are being sarcastic, but actually a radically reduced executive branch would be a huge step in the right direction for the actual rights of citizens to determine their own laws.
You meant to say "extremely wealthy citizens." The power vacuum that comes with less government is always filled-in by people with the most resources. And those sorts of people only see the non-wealthy as objects to be exploited for them to acquire even more wealth.
I refuse to be that cynical. All people can vote. Chevron was enacted in 1984. So the most progressive periods in US History occurred before it was enacted, when (according to you) a power vacuum was filled in by the people with the most resources.
Why didn't those super powerful vacuum-fillers carry the day in the Civil Rights Movement, or when marginal income tax rates were 90+%, or when the EPA was created? Because they don't have the power that everyone thinks they do (maybe even they think they have, themselves).
No, I do not think that. I'll copy/paste this from another reply I made to a very similar comment:
I do not expect Congress to atomically approve or disapprove every regulatory action. That is a straw man. I expect them to write clear laws that state what agencies can do, what they cannot do, and how they should do it.
The case before the court is a good example of how the opaque and unaccountable nature of a federal agency allows them to serve their own self-interest at the expense of the citizens they are supposed to protect. Specifically, Congress specified in law that "authorizes the government to require trained, professional observers on regulated fishing vessels". But their law did not specify who would pay for these observers. So under Chevron, the agency got to decide. And, shocker! They decided they did not have to pay for it.
This ruling stops that specific abuse, and hopefully many others. The actions of federal agencies is not generally a thing to be desired.
> No, I do not think that. I'll copy/paste this from another reply I made to a very similar comment:
> I do not expect Congress to atomically approve or disapprove every regulatory action. That is a straw man. I expect them to write clear laws that state what agencies can do, what they cannot do, and how they should do it.
But it isn't, the world changes, writing laws that anticipate these changes is equivalent to predicting the future. Take for example laws to regulate the telephone networks, those networks over time changed from carrying voice traffic to including data to carrying data exclusively (and voice just being data). So even if we believe the networks are effectively the same, Congress now has to waste their time to write new laws to keep up with those technological advances (and telecom is by far from the only area, what about new medical therapies that we hadn't imagined previously. Should Congress write new laws for these? ) essentially this is the way to paralyze it.
> The case before the court is a good example of how the opaque and unaccountable nature of a federal agency allows them to serve their own self-interest at the expense of the citizens they are supposed to protect. Specifically, Congress specified in law that "authorizes the government to require trained, professional observers on regulated fishing vessels". But their law did not specify who would pay for these observers. So under Chevron, the agency got to decide. And, shocker! They decided they did not have to pay for it.
I don't see what is shocking about it. Are you shocked that you have to pay for your rubbish collection (which is a requirement for living in many places)?
> This ruling stops that specific abuse, and hopefully many others. The actions of federal agencies is not generally a thing to be desired.
> Specifically, Congress specified in law that "authorizes the government to require trained, professional observers on regulated fishing vessels". But their law did not specify who would pay for these observers. So under Chevron, the agency got to decide. And, shocker! They decided they did not have to pay for it.
Isn't that just the default assumption of all regulatory law? e.g. when the FDA adds an ingredient labeling requirement, there's no expectation that the FDA has to pay for the costs of adding the labels. When the EPA says "hey you can't dump your waste in this river" they don't have to pay the cost of getting rid of it in a compliant way. This doesn't strike me as an abuse at all.
The American system has always been full-throated adversarial -- and extremely successful. The historical system of legislature could delegate, and if the delegation went bad, the judiciary could intervene, rather than the legislature has to intervene in every bit of administrative minutae.
Analogy would roughly be...idk, the CEO has HR handle pencil procurement. HR, over the years, used this to interpret they could swap in mechanical pencils, erasable pens. But the new CFO tells the board this has to stop, the CEO is responsible for signing off on expenses. And then the employees say this is a good thing, that'll get the CEO more involved. But the CEO is already involved, just busy with other things.