[tpmoney]

I have very little faith in the ability of narrowly specialized lawyers to work outside their core competency. The courts get things wrong all the time. I also have little faith in the ability of narrowly specialized administrators outside their own core competency (that being administration), or for that matter, administrators in a revolving door of regulatory capture.

My faith is in the same thing all of open source places their faith in, enough eyeballs. Congress makes a law, administrators enforce said law, citizens challenge said enforcement, courts rule on the state of the law, congress makes a law. And as we iterate over this process, the bugs are ironed out, the stakeholders have input and we work ever more towards a "more perfect" ideal.

[mullingitover]

> Congress makes a law, administrators enforce said law, citizens challenge said enforcement, courts rule on the state of the law, congress makes a law.

This is a wholesome, well intentioned idea that I support.

The problem is that for most of our lifetimes congress has been operating under a model, specified by the Supreme Court, that regulators would make a reasonable interpretation of the laws that congress wrote. Think of it as the city council saying "The parks service shall keep the parks clean and safe." Not splitting hairs about every possible threat to safety, or defining exactly what clean means. Like it or not, legislators can't and don't want to exhaustively consider every possibility, and they can't react in a timely fashion to novel problems.

The courts suddenly turning this arrangement on its head and seizing the reins is not something that voters or legislators ever envisioned. It's exactly the kind of disruptive, chaotic move that an apolitical court would run far away from, and exactly the kind of move that destroys faith in the courts.

The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.

[tpmoney]

I don't think that the removal of the Chevron deference means that regulators can't make "reasonable interpretations" of the laws. I don't think one could reasonably say that regulators were prevented from doing so from the founding of the country until 1984. The Chevron deference wasn't giving regulators the ability to make reasonable interpretations, it was a policy of biasing the courts to that interpretation. In my opinion that wasn't a good thing. The courts are inherently biased towards the government in the first place, what with them being part of the government, there's no reason to have an official policy of bias as well.

The parks service can continue to be mandated to "keep the parks clean and safe", but when their regulation that "no minor children shall be allowed in the parks except under the supervision of a related adult" is challenged by the local pre-schools because it prevents them from having field trips to the parks, the courts are no longer required to find that because requiring children to be supervised by relatives is a reasonable interpretation of "keeping the parks safe" that they must then conclude the regulation is within the scope of authority.

>The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.

I find myself hoping that the other branches rather take a sober look at their own behavior and seek to remove the need for the courts to be so involved in the day to day operations of the government. We are in this position largely because for a few decades now Congress has abdicated their responsibility to legislate and regulate and also to represent the people in favor of deadlocking themselves and avoiding responsibility for making hard decisions. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of this. It's exactly the sort of major change in regulation of communications that congress should absolutely be responsible for outlining, and instead they have allowed the executive branch and the courts to fight it out and so we've seen it flip flop from being law to not law multiple times.