[maximusdrex]

Your understanding is not correct. Chevron deference never meant agencies can just make up and pass law; it was a legal doctrine which merely stated that in places where the law is ambiguous (say a law declares water must be clean of pollutants, or bans pistol braces) that courts should look at any guidance from relevant agencies for guidance, since supposedly they should know more about the subject than the courts. It never allowed agencies to circumvent congress or prevented congress from further clarifying law. For example, the DEA doesn’t have the power to schedule drugs due to chevron, Congress includes provisions for the AG to reschedule drugs, which the AG historically has delegated to the DEA, the point being this was a power explicitly granted by congress. While it may sound nice to you right now that the Supreme Court did away with chevron due to your gripes with the ATF, now the definitions of machine guns or pistols or anything else are up to the whims of any judge in any jurisdiction, which could be better or, given that judges likely have even less knowledge of the subject than the ATF, probably worse and more inconsistent.

[smsm42]

The problem with this is once this has been established, the Congress started being lazy and just throw the lawmaking to the bureaucrats, essentially saying "well. we make this agency and they will figure out the rules, we don't care, whatever". And this makes the law completely unaccessible to the regular citizen and the people being completely unable to influence which laws they are living by. While you can, with great effort, dislodge a bad congressman, there's practically no way for a regular citizen to affect anything within a bureaucratic regulatory agency and they are essentially in charge of lawmaking now. They can pass any law they want - and before SCOTUS intervention, Chevron ensured that you have no recourse at all against them, since the courts (by itself a hugely expensive and prohibitively complex process) will just tell you "the Congress passed the authority to the bureaucrats, so they can do whatever they like, we're not intervening". This is not a good balance of powers and not a good way to manage the affairs in the country.

> given that judges likely have even less knowledge of the subject than the ATF, probably worse and more inconsistent.

In the unicorn rainbow world where the regulatory agencies are omniscient saints only worrying about the common good, that may be an argument. In the real world, where the regulators are extremely politicized, extremely concerned with gaining more power and extremely happy to pass completely absurd and harmful regulations if it fits their particular agenda, it's not. And by now we all know this is the world we are living in.

[Ajedi32]

> Chevron deference never meant agencies can just make up and pass law

Not on it's own, no. The bigger culprit there is the erosion of the nondelegation doctrine. But Chevron aggravated the problem by allowing agencies to stretch their authority beyond what even congress intended with little possibility of legal challenge.

Interpreting the law is and should be the role of the courts, not the role of the agencies that that law is supposed to be governing. It'd be like if we passed a law intended to regulate insurance companies, and the courts decided to give deference to the insurance company's interpretation of that law because "they're the experts on insurance".

[llamaimperative]

This apparently needs to be said a million times:

You could always argue in court that the agency’s interpretation of the statute was not reasonable. The court could always agree with you and establish case law against that interpretation.

It was a two part test:

1. Is the statute clear? If so, defer to statute. Otherwise, go to (2).

2. Is the agency’s interpretation reasonable? If so, defer to agency. Otherwise, the agency's rule is no longer enforceable.

Now, the court is allowed to come up with its own interpretation even in the presence of a reasonable agency interpretation. That is the only change. If the agency's interpretation was unreasonable, then it was already going to get thrown out.

The courts took the authority to throw out interpretations that they themselves (the court!) think are reasonable. Unreasonable interpretations were NEVER protected by Chevron deference.

[Ajedi32]

Correct, that's why I said "little possibility of legal challenge" not "no possibility of legal challenge". Proving something is "not reasonable" in a legal sense is a pretty high bar to clear. The point still stands.

[llamaimperative]

There's ample possibility of legal challenge. There was a low possibility of legal overturn for one specific reason: courts generally agreed that agencies' interpretations were reasonable.

> Proving something is "not reasonable" in a legal sense is a pretty high bar to clear

Sure it is, but that is literally not the bar. The courts always had the authority to do their own analysis of reasonableness so long as the challenger raised the question. In fact, they didn't just have the authority to do it, they were obligated to do it.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706

The low probability of overturn is an argument for Chevron deference. It is empirical proof that courts almost always found agencies' rules to be reasonable interpretations.

[Ajedi32]

The fact that they're analyzing the reasonableness of the agencies' interpretations and not the correctness of their interpretations is precisely the problem. There are a lot of possible interpretations of the law that are reasonable but not correct. The judiciary's job is supposed to be to interpret the law, not just to decide whether defendant's own personal interpretation meets some minimum bar of reasonableness.

[llamaimperative]

Arguing is easy when you simply assert your conclusion! :)

"Correctness" is an actually meaningless concept here. Correct according to which rubric? Please answer specifically.

[amanaplanacanal]

The thing is: if Congress thinks executive branch agencies are interpreting laws in ways they didn't intend, they can change the law to clarify their intent. If they fail to do so, I have to assume the agencies are doing what Congress intended. But the supreme Court evidently disagrees.

[Ajedi32]

Only with the willing cooperation of the executive branch, or a veto proof majority in both houses. Otherwise the very executive they are trying to reign in could just veto the bill to allow the agencies to continue overstepping their authority.

But that's beside the point anyway, because it shouldn't have to be the legislature's job to be constantly weighing in on whether an agency is following the law as written. That's literally what the courts are for; to interpret nuances of the law.

[michaelmrose]

Is there a well functioning large country that doesn't effectively govern this way?

The US isn't well functioning its just rich

[Ajedi32]

I think most democratic nations have a similar principle of separation of powers, so... almost all of them?

The US is rich because it's well functioning.

[hakfoo]

The US is rich for many reasons that have little to do with being well governed.

* The country was launched on most of a century of essentially "free" land grabs-- limited pushback from native civilizations. buying cheap from distressed foreign powers (Louisiana), the main wars of conquest being insignificant squabbles with Mexico over trifles.

* Said land was also compelling-- you weren't fighting the environment to extract value the way you would be in Siberia.

* After 1865, no significant nation-scale conflict on the territory itself to blow down existing investments.

* This created an opportunity for bulk immigration-- first with Homestead Act style programmes and then because the American economy was compelling enough to be a pull by itself. A high immigrant population has a unique "opt-in" demographics-- a situation that self-selects for entrepeneurialism.

None of this required wildly competent government. George Washington could have chosen to be a king, a religious caliph, or a protosocialist planning enthusiast, and the deck would have still held almost all the same cards.

[michaelmrose]

Name one and detail how the administrative state differs

[plagiarist]

It would not be like that, since insurance companies are not government agencies.

[Ajedi32]

That's an irrelevant distinction. Neither are part of the judicial branch, which is the relevant consideration here.

Consider: Congress passes a law which sets limits on the authority of an agency. You think the agency itself should get to decide what that law actually means? And the courts, the branch of government specifically granted the role of arbiter by our constitution, should be required to differ to that interpretation if anyone ever objects and brings a lawsuit? It's absurd, and no less so than if the law was concerning a private company rather than a public agency.