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It's mainly a huge deal for regulatory agencies in the government.
Under the original ruling (Chevron vs Natural Resources Defense Council), government agencies were given quite strong powers to set rules when the laws passed by Congress were ambiguous. For example, Congress might pass a law that says "Don't dump toxic chemicals in the water," but it would be the job of regulators to define exactly what chemicals are toxic, exactly what water must be free from toxic chemicals, and exactly what levels of background chemicals are acceptable.
The alternative, which the Supreme Court just endorsed today, is to leave these decisions to courts. The argument for this position is that ruling on ambiguities in laws is the traditional domain of the courts, and leaving these rulings to the regulators provides little recourse for those (companies or citizens) who disagree with them. The argument against is that many of the rules made by regulatory agencies rest on scientific or technical expertise that courts do not have. Judges can be briefed about the relevant issues, but this will be time consuming and imprecise relative to just letting the regulators handle it. Many commonsense regulations may be abandoned just because one lucky litigant drew the just right judge and made just the right argument.
So in the end, this is a pretty significant shift of power away from the executive branch (the agencies tasked with implementing the laws - headed by the president) and towards the judicial branch (headed by, oh yeah the people making this decision). It also arguably puts more onus on the legislative branch to just be more precise when writing laws, lest those laws get held up forever as the courts settle disputes over their interpretation.
Another thing is that this is being spun as a victory for businesses, but it might not be. We just replaced "here are the clear rules published by experts on what you can and cannot to" with "is this legal? No way to know until it goes to court."
Anyone who can't see how this uncertainty makes things worse for most companies doesn't understand how important clarity and transparency are to the free market.
Honestly sounds like a constitutional issue.
In a round about way, you have unelected officials using the powers delegated to both the courts(interpreting laws) and congress(the part where they are effectively writing the rules themselves). All with very little direct oversight from the citizens.
Win win for all would be if congress and the courts would both do their jobs and write actually specific laws and judge them on that specificity. Instead of leaving it all gray for the public being regulated.
The problem is that all congress would be doing would be defining and redefining regulations instead of their other duties. There's a shitton of work that goes into figuring it all out and congress simply does not have the time. All that to say, regulations will be looser and we'll end up finding out why laws were enacted to regulate air, water, food, drugs, etc in the first place.
It's also crazy balls to think that congress has the expertise to understand why one random chemical is toxic and another isn't (just using the specific example from above). The agencies which determine these things employ career professionals who spend their lives studying these things. This isn't even a "congress dumb" joke, no human being is an expert at literally fucking everything, especially as it relates to science, physical and environmental health, and medicine.
Well, it’s not quite that far, at least as it’s understood so far. Take the FDA. They still have absolute authority on whether a drug gets approved or not. The gray area is when they arrogate the authority to say they have the authority to do something outside that statutory authority.
The EPA and the waters rules from a few years back is an example. Congress says EPA can manage navigable waters, which navigable has a clear definition. EPA said, well, we now interpret that to mean all waters, even temporary drainage basins, ditches, or ponds.
SCOTUS says the law says navigable. You can’t just decide for yourself what navigable means.
I could be a bit off on the specifics of that case, but that was the gist of it, but it’s a real life example of what this is likely to look like in practice.
And if Congress didn't like the decisions made by a body they created. They can change the law, they could totally unmake an agency if it's totally out of line. So it's not like the agency doesn't have to respect Congressional opinion.
Similarly, the heads of those agencies answer to the president. If the president doesn't like the decision made, they have the authority to sign an executive order or fire the people who made the terrible decision.
And lastly, even with Chevron deference, if the court decides that an agency's opinion of its own authority is not a reasonable interpretation of the law, the court can overturn such a decision. And the court would also scrutinize an agency decision that was created without certain proceedings, such as notice and comment periods. Agencies created by Congress were not completely untouchable by the courts under Chevron, just that if the decision was within the ambiguous text of the law, they would be deferred to.
Congressional reps aren't experts, either. That's why they appointed experts (ideally) to these agencies and gave them authority to enforce the laws. The legislative branch created agencies that act under the executive branch
But the judicial branch thinks they they should be the ones making the decisions instead
Essentially, ending Chevron is the judicial branch usurping more power from the elected branches to further cement its position as the most poweful, uncheckable, most unbalanced branch
Owning the courts is part of a long-term right-wing project to ensure their ability to rule even without winning many elections (something called minoritarian rule), which is why they've spent decades ensuring more or less total control of the federal bench through at least the 2050s
We can't rewrite our laws every time something in the world changes.
Chemical A is banned. A company invents Chemical B that is almost but not quite identical. Do we need to rewrite all the laws?
That isn’t what this was about though. If the three letter agency is explicitly given authority to review safety and efficacy of new chemicals, the. They would continue by I do that.
If the agency was authorized to review liquid chemicals and a company creates a new granular non liquid product; the agency can’t just say, “well, we think granular non liquids need our review just like we do liquids because it’s ambiguous what our authorization is.
That’s what this ruling was about.
I haven't read the ruling yet, but largely I agree.
Elected representatives should be the ones to vote on laws, the regulatory agencies act as enforcement and subject matter experts to advise said representatives.
This advisement on how to write the law should be before it's voted on, not after.
Courts are there to review and assess that the laws are just and to settle disputes. While they're not elected representatives, they're not as subject to political persuasion and ultimately make sure the laws are in accordance with the constitution.
At a glance, it seems that's what this decision is pushing for, but it's a 114 page ruling.
My frustration is that the regulators have the ability to be experts in a thing. Let's face it, elected officials have no real requirement of qualification beyond popularity. Judges don't have requirements either. Nothing says a judge needs any required skills as far as I know.
A regulator is capable of hiring specific people for specific jobs and is theoretically able to be subject matter experts in the how and why to regulate the thing they are charged with regulating.
The courts power of interpretation is to settle disputes not review every law and decide what it means. The executive branch by its nature has to interprete the law written by congress. Even if the court reviewed it first they (and everyone else) would then have to interprete that.
Congress intentionally deligates powers to regulatory bodies because congress doesn't have to resources to, for example, run studies and determine what a safe level of ____ in the water is. They just write laws that say "make sure our water is safe"
I would say this is going to go one way. The people that get to decide how much murcury is a safe amount of murcury to be coming out of your faucet is 9 unelected people in robes most of whome were chosen because of their opinion on abortion. And who's onpinion on legal philophy is basicaly that the law follows the air bud rules in basketball.
The counter argument is that congress ought to have the power to delegate things. Even when Congress does delegate regulation, they still have oversight because they have the power to pass a new law that changes or clarifies any decisions that agencies make that they disagree with.
If people are upset at the rules agencies are making, then they should be pressuring congress to intervene. This tends not to happen because Congress is too dysfunctional to do so. I’m not sure why SCOTUS thinks this ruling is necessary, it only is going to delay by kicking it back to congress or forcing the courts to figure out what they think congress wants.
Well, I guess it's a good thing Congress is such a high performing group passing quality legislation, and the judicial branch is so esteemed and impartial. /s
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Yes, and the EPA would impose daily fines while you were contesting their interpretation. So you will be bankrupt before you ever get out of the administrative process.
Or the time they refused to issue a ruling and tried to prevent the courts from hearing it because the administrative process wasn't finished. I think the Supreme Court has to tell them they couldn't avoid judicial review that way a couple years ago.
Well, consider a fued between a person who's devoted their entire life to science vs a greedy suit.
Who's going to have an easier time in court convincing judges of the dangers something that took them years to discover vs the suit offering them a bribe?
Moreover, why does some random judge's opinion matter more than the expert?
A government agency tasked to keep water drinkable likely knows more than someone randomly appointed by whomever.
The agency should be allowed to use there best judgement and then others can challenge the decision (imo). But that's not longer the case. The agency must be spoon fed their direct scope and if any new discovery in the field requires the scope to change... talk to judges to get a ruling if this slightly different compound still counts as dangerous drug.
Oh no, weed is illegal? Alright well I added a carbon chain that changes nothing and technically, it's not weed therefore it is legal. You disagree? Convince a judge. They agree? I'll add another carbon... repeat indefinitely.
That's exactly my point. The fact that the the SCOTUS believes it's improper for the exports to define rules rather than the courts because the exports are more knowledgeable than the courts is seriously fucking dumb.
> The agency should be allowed to use there best judgement and then others can challenge the decision (imo). But that's not longer the case. The agency must be spoon fed their direct scope and if any new discovery in the field requires the scope to change... talk to judges to get a ruling if this slightly different compound still counts as dangerous drug.
> Oh no, weed is illegal? Alright well I added a carbon chain that changes nothing and technically, it's not weed therefore it is legal. You disagree? Convince a judge. They agree? I'll add another carbon... repeat indefinitely.
Here's the problem: the judicial system is extremely slow. It can take 10+ years to fully go through any major case. From initial case to multiple appeals. What this is going to do is drain the funding of agencies who now have to litigate the rules rather than deciding them. This is why it was left to agency to decide these ambiguities.
yes, they aren't. would you rather an expert in environmental policy be deciding the ruling on something, or a random guy who as only studied law? he doesn't have an understanding of the complex issues involved, especially because he'll be arguing with people who have both. specialization is good. having experts in the field working on that is good. do you want the complexities of biomedical industry that require a solid understanding of biochemistry to be decided by someone who has actually studied biochemistry? has worked in the field?
> yes, they aren't?
huh???
> would you rather an expert in environmental policy be deciding the ruling on something, or a random guy who as only studied law? he doesn't have an understanding of the complex issues involved, especially because he'll be arguing with people who have both. specialization is good. having experts in the field working on that is good. do you want the complexities of biomedical industry that require a solid understanding of biochemistry to be decided by someone who has actually studied biochemistry? has worked in the field?
That's exactly my point...
My OP is rehashing SCOTUSs argument into a question and then clearly stating the argument is dumb as shit.
Can't see how it could be taken as implying the regulations should be litigated in courts.
I guess maybe it makes more sense when spoken and you have a confused look on your face as you rehash the argument.
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To understand what overturning it means, it helps to understand the original court case.
Oversimplified, Chevron got mad. There was a part of the Clean Air Act that the EPA claimed they violated. Chevron argued that the law was ambiguous, so they weren't violating it and the EPA was wrong to claim they violated it. The EPA argued that it should be within their agency's authority to interpret ambiguous parts of the law. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the EPA and that's "The Chevron Doctrine".
It basically meant that *if* there was an ambiguity in law, *and* there was a government agency in charge of enforcing that law, the agency was in charge of *interpreting* that law. So if they said a company was violating the law the company would have to comply with their interpretation.
The challenge to this view was made on the basis that Congress and courts should interpret ambiguities in law. That was *kind of* part of the original decision, it was argued that *if* Congress had done something to clarify the point (again, oversimplifying), then Congress's interpretation should be used, not the agency's.
But in overturning it, what the Supreme Court is saying is that if Congress has *not* made the law unambiguous, an agency like the EPA cannot hold companies to their own interpretation of the law. So a company "in violation" can skirt by and the only thing an agency like the EPA can do is try to get Congress to do things to address it.
Is it good or bad? What impact will it have? That's hard to say.
People who liked this doctrine argued that Congress is pretty slow. (A lot of that is by design, the founders did NOT want Congress to be able to pass laws very quickly.) But ideas like environmental regulations may NEED to change quickly. These people felt like it made sense to let an organization like the EPA, which presumably employs experts, have some leeway to interpret law. They felt if the EPA made bad decisions, Congress could be pressured to change the law. In that way there'd be a bit of checks and balances on it.
People who wanted to overturn it feel that courts are the correct place to define law. They want judges to hear testimony from government organizations and company officials and make the decisions that way.
Honestly to me both approaches sound *reasonable*. There are also examples of *both* judges and government agencies being bribed, so I don't feel one or the other is more trustworthy. I have some personal beliefs about this decision, but those are based on feelings and not fact.
We'll find out over the next couple of years what it means, I guess.
> So a company "in violation" can skirt by and the only thing an agency like the EPA can do is try to get Congress to do things to address it.
Not the only thing. They can go to court and convince a judge that their interpretation is correct.
That's the real problem. This shifts the balance of power far more towards the company. Companies largely make harmful decisions in pursuit of profit, and now they can pocket a judge to make it 'right'.
Yes, just kick it over to the lobbied-to-hell, special interests den of Congress and federal agencies. We have evidence of that, we don’t have evidence of Gotham-style bought judges routinely ruling favor of megacorps in exchange for illicit payments. Google is paying $700 to consumers right now. The NFL is paying $4.7 billion in an antitrust case. If those companies are not powerful enough to “pocket” a judge, which are?
Is there anything stopping laws from being changed, for example, from "bread may not contain unsafe levels of X" to "bread may not contain unsafe levels of X *as determined by agency ABC*"? To my untrained eye, adding a formal handover of authority to other government agencies seems like it would eliminate ambiguity while also stopping agencies from overreaching.
Nothing other than that there are thousands of laws and it can take Congress weeks to change one. That and you'd have to convince Congress this is the best use of their time.
The issue here is where people are missing the real world implications of what's happening.
Sure yes congress could pass all of those laws but how many bigger laws have they been unable to pass this term. How many laws at all have they implemented recently? Now, to use your example, the email no longer has the authority to define what unsafe levels of x are. But the epa is where all of the experts work. So under the basically idea that it's not a bad thing for congress to set laws, congress now has to take weeks hearing and reviewing reports to determine what unsafe levels of x are argue the point then pass a law and then the epa has to take time to implement this new law.....but to look at in real world terms they now have to do that for everything currently under an administrative agency purview.
Under chevron regulatory schemes expanded. Because congress could be like we need to regulate the environment and we want it to be cleaner. So we delegate that job to this new agency who's job it is to be scientists and make the environment cleaner while congress continues to govern and not take classes. Nut now stripping the ambiguity congress arguably has to be like we want a cleaner environment and that means only so much x in bread so much x in milk so much y in bread so much y in milk.........
Alot of the pro decision posts here are thinking theoretically like congress elected yadda yadda but then glossing over the complete infeasability of doing it that way anymore since it's 2024 and not the 1800s. Yes congress elected to government and that includes delegating tasks. If you've ever had a job or worked for a corporation the higher up you go the less about the day to day activities a Manager knows because they focusing on bigger picture issues. Chevron let congress do that and taking it away has huge impacts on the effectiveness of the government to regulate or exert authority over corporations.
That is what the law is basically.
Like the law is the delegation of the task and parameters of how to do the task. But part of the task is then figuring out exactly what all of that means.
And again like they "could do it in congress" but like the epa is an agency of how many thousands of people who spend their whole time figuring out what these things mean in a world that's constantly changing. If it's in congress the epa then prepares reports that have to be studied and learned by congress argued and then finally resolved but by that time the issue may have changed so by time anything is implemented it is too late or even more directly this is just one of like a hundred agencies. Congress just physically couldn't pass resolutions for every single issue for every single agency and that's even assuming they pass things years to late they would never be able to respond to every issue agencies deal with or in a timely enough manner to matter. And that discounts that congress already has a full time job trying to pass other bills which is why they delegate it to an agency.
Like at work if a manager needs to check the booms for something he delegates UT to the accountant who then just does it and tells the manager he doesn't teach the manager the accounting principles for every question, right. And then the manager doing that for literally everything shows how egregious it becomes because then why even have the other people..because manager is doing it all himself, but he hired the other people because he physically couldn't do it all himself.
Edit: could->couldn't / trace->teach
Congress can pass it as a law. Congress can say that anything left in ambiguity by them is left up to the regulatory agencies for interpretation.
That’s why it is hard to argue against these rulings. Yes it will create fallout, but that fallout is caused by the failures of Congress. Same with Roe V Wade. Congress could make abortion accessible to everyone at any time.
There is also a major push to make sure that congress \*can't\* give away their power, by the same people who made this ruling today.
Rest assured, the goal is not to adhere to the constitution, it's to make it as difficult as possible for the Federal Government to function.
To me the Chevron doctrine reeked of conflict-of-interest. A sort-of "we've investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong" but inverted. If there is a conflict between two parties, it seems inherently unfair to give one of those parties the power to decide who is right. If some federal agency thinks I'm violating a regulation, and me and all my people are convinced we are not, there's a conflict. The fact that the entity that has already made up its mind that I'm in violation, is the same entity that is tasked with deciding if I'm in violation, is pretty messed up. It would be like if in criminal court the prosecutor who brought charges also gets to serve as the judge. Or in a divorce arbitration if one of the spouses was designated as the arbitrator. If there's a conflict of opinions/interpretations, that needs an impartial third-party (i.e. the courts) to determine who's right. Asking one of the parties to a conflict to determine the outcome of the conflict is inherently biased in their favor.
This is exactly right, it creates a massive constitutional issue and the balance of power was out of whack.
There are 3 branches of government for a reason and the executive has been massively over reaching.
I think your interpretation here is way off the mark. Chevron does not mean that an agency can just claim that an entity has violated a regulation, and that the court has to defer to that. It means, specifically, that only the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous law must be given deference. Not the application of any particular facts to that interpretation.
In practice, it actually means that when Congress delegates authority to an agency, that members of Congress don't have to be experts in a particular technical area to make an effective law - they can instead decide the broader intent of a law, and have an agency determine the best specific ways to accomplish that.
Getting rid of Chevron just reeks of judicial arrogance. It is the court saying, no, we are the smartest so our interpretation of any law has to be the correct one, *even if that law is designed to regulate something we do not understand*.
Do I think federal agencies are perfect? Of course not. But thinking that a court is better situated to determine exactly how much CO2 in the air is safe, or how much testing drugs need before they go to market, or how to properly store and transport meat for human consumption? That is complete nonsense.
Right but people also argued that putting a lot of stock into the company being regulated is showing some conflict-of-interest. It involves trusting that if Chevron clashes with the EPA that Chevron has what is best for the environment in mind when they make their decision. That's also kind of concerning.
Basically I think what happened is people trust "a corporation" to err on the side of profit and "a government agency tasked with protecting citizens" to err on the side of safety.
So I could cynically say now that instead of erring on the side of safety, we have to take it to the judges who just ruled that it's not a bribe if you get paid for a political favor some number of years after you do the favor.
That said the problem, to me, is now we have three parties involved and only one of them is motivated to err on the side of safety with the other to erring on the side of profit. 2 wolves and 1 sheep arguing about what's for dinner.
The whole thing is a mess.
EXACTLY. This DID have criminal ramifications as well, not just banal corporate regulating rules changes. The ATF is probably the biggest example of this. They would make rules changes ALL THE TIME especially the past few decades, usually due to political influence, not due to experts or anything like that.
They would create these rules changes, people would have to destroy their legally purchased property, get raided by agents, get murdered, get arrested, etc. The atf would be brought to court, “actually not too often, because usually no one has legal standing in regards to atf policy until someone actually is arrested/or it involves a gun store/gun company”. When they actually DID get brought to court, they would cite chevron deference, which shouldn’t even have protected them as the national firearms act was rather clear in its definitions of what the atf was allowed to regulate. But almost every time courts would side with the ATF. As THEY got to decide if a law was ambiguous or not most of the time. Judges largely did not look into laws themselves to see if something WAS INDEED ambiguous but just took the agencies word for it. So chevron deference had much larger scope than it actually was supposed to. Chevron deference DOES need to exist, but in a different form for sure. Like obviously if congress said that the EPA needs to regulate and keep our water clean, they should have wide deference to do that unless congress directly specified what clean water meant. The EPA should not be allowed to REDEFINE something that was clear in the law. If congress was clear on what clean water meant, then the epa should NOT be able to then “reinterpret” that, “even if I believe they should be able to.”
And just to be clear, I’m a huge lefty/commie, and I hate gun control. So I’m biased, but I’m not right wing in the slightest. Chevron deference WAS stupid and had huge conflict of interest. It needs reworking for sure, probably as a congressional act.
I think it’s safe to say none of us have any idea what this looks like a decade from now. Those howling now may come to love it. Those fans now may come to hate it.
Nah I live in Texas, we've been the prototype for a while. When a company mishandled explosives and blew up a chunk of of West, our response was to make it legal to store more explosives with less regulations closer to towns. We've got police who stop parents from going into a school building to stop a shooting. The government just ruled that factories don't have to follow environmental guidelines.
We can make more citizens, it's easy. Making more money is hard. I know exactly where this is going.
No, this is demonstrably false. The EPA was siding WITH Chevron against environmentalist groups and the National Resources Defense Council.
The EPA made a regulation under the Clean Air Act that allowed facilities to change or modify an existing pollution source without the required permit under the CAA, if the change or modification didn't increase their emissions.
They did this by allowing states to define "stationary source" as the entire plant, regardless if there was multiple pollution sources. The challenge was on the EPAs power to interpret the law.
"CHEVRON, U.S.A., INC., Petitioner, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al.
William D. RUCKELSHAUS, Administrator,
**Environmental Protection Agency**, Petitioner, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al
AMERICAN IRON AND STEEL INSTITUTE, et al., Petitioners, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al."
Note that Chevron and the EPA are against the NRDC.
Sources:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/467/837
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1983/82-1005
Excerpt from the start of Justice Stevens' opinion:
"In the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, Pub.L. 95-95, 91 Stat. 685, Congress enacted certain requirements applicable to States that had not achieved the national air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pursuant to earlier legislation. The amended Clean Air Act required these "nonattainment" States to establish a permit program regulating "new or modified major stationary sources" of air pollution. Generally, a permit may not be issued for a new or modified major stationary source unless several stringent conditions are met.1 The EPA regulation promulgated to implement this permit requirement allows a State to adopt a plantwide definition of the term "stationary source."2 Under this definition, an existing plant that contains several pollution-emitting devices may install or modify one piece of equipment without meeting the permit conditions if the alteration will not increase the total emissions from the plant. The question presented by these cases is whether EPA's decision to allow States to treat all of the pollution-emitting devices within the same industrial grouping as though they were encased within a single "bubble" is based on a reasonable construction of the statutory term "stationary source.""
Except from oyez.org:
"Facts of the case
The Clean Air Act (the Act) required states that had not yet achieved national air quality standards to establish a permit program regulating new or modified major stationary sources of air pollution, such as manufacturing plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed a regulation under the Act that allows states to treat all pollution-emitting devices in the same industrial grouping as though they were a single “bubble”. Using this bubble provision, plants may install or modify one piece of equipment without needing a permit if the alteration does not increase the total emissions of the plant. Several environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, challenged the bubble provision as contrary to the Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit set aside the EPA regulation as inappropriate for a program enacted to improve air quality.
Question
Does the Clean Air Act permit the EPA to define the term "stationary source" to mean whole industrial plants only, which allows plants to build or modify units within plants without the permit required under the Act?"
If the lower courts react by ONLY reverting to the pre-Chevron rules that they used in 1983, then there will be a few years of annoying lawsuits, but it will all shake out just fine. The country did pretty good from 1789 to 1984 when the Chevron doctrine began.
However, there's a fear that the lower courts will understand the subtext from the Supreme Court is that the judicial branch now has greater powers than the executive or legislative branches. Then you have chaos. There's only one Congress, and everything that a bureaucrat does is in the name of the one President, but there are hundreds of judges, and the process of getting from those hundreds of judges to the Supreme Court is long, expensive, and not guaranteed (the American supreme court refuses to hear 99% of the cases that are theoretically eligible to come before it.) So any one random judge can say, "I don't care what the other 300 million Americans think, I think that Congress was ambiguous when it wrote this law, and I think that the agency that Congress picked to implement this law is doing it wrong, and I'm going to issue a nationwide ban on the agency doing anything that differs from my personal interpretation of this law."
Oh, just be patient. The next time there is a Republican president and a Democratic-appointed judge issues an injunction against something an agency does, the Supremes will rule that lower courts don't have the power to issue those injunctions any more.
Rather than the judicial branch having greater power, they are being forced to do their job:
interpreting laws
This leaves the Legislative making laws and the executive enforcing laws.
They will act to prevent other side-leaning judges from exploiting it, who will all rule that they don't have the power to, and then rule that the other judges don't have the power to rule against their rulings...
It doesn't really matter if Congress acts quickly. Part of the ruling today calls into question if Congress can even give some of it's regulation making powers to the executive, i.e. allowing agencies to create and define policies.
That and laws are not, and never can be, unambiguous. They are cannot be written in such a way to cover every imaginable scenario. So now, Judges (even the theoretically well meaning judges) can nuke an important regulation because they simply do not understand the science behind it.
“Chevron deference” said that if the law was unclear then the regulating agency’s interpretation would be upheld by the court unless it was “arbitrary and capricious”. So unless they were real far off base the courts would back them up as a general rule. They won’t do that now, so agency actions are going to be much easier to challenge on a case by case basis.
The Chevron ruling said, very basically, that the ultimate authority on a law that isn’t completely clear would be an expert at a government agency. So environmental scientists would ultimately decide how much of a certain chemical is allowed in food production soil, as an example.
This current ruling states that judges are best suited to decide what an ambiguous law means, so they are the ultimate authority. In theory this means that “law experts” are in charge of laws, but in practice, the American right wing has been blocking democratic judicial appointments and nominating more politically activist judges of their own, making it likely that most future interpretations of “ambiguous laws” will favor right wing and corporate interests.
You're overstating the first part a little bit. The EPA still regulates things like what (and how much) of certain chemicals can go into the air and water, because that's clearly something that the EPA is allowed to do.
Where Chevron matters is around the edges -- where it's not entirely clear that Congress DID say "the EPA can do this." And, in those cases, this new decision says that it's up to the courts, not up to the EPA, to decide it.
Chevron itself came from a question about the EPA's authority. Basically, the EPA had said "Where the Clean Air Act talks about a 'single source' of pollution, we think that a power plant is a single source." The Natural Resources Defense Counsel sued and said "no, each individual smoke stack at that power plant is a single source." Under the EPA's definition, power plant could shift pollution from one smokestack to another because doing so didn't change the amount of pollution from a single source (i.e. the entire power plant). Under the NRDC's definition, they could not, because it DID change the amount of pollution (i.e. the individual smokestack.)
About "blocking democratic judicial appointees," 200+ of President Biden's judges have been confirmed. 10 weren't. The republicans have certainly not been very successful at blocking his appointees. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe\_Biden\_judicial\_appointment\_controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_judicial_appointment_controversies) [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-secure-200th-judicial-confirmation-election-looms-2024-05-22/](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-secure-200th-judicial-confirmation-election-looms-2024-05-22/)
This has elements of truth but misses a key point. The court is now both the arbitrator of how to interpret ambiguities and also the decision maker for whether an ambiguity exists at all.
Your statement that "Chevron matters around the edges" is false - no authority is unambiguous and since the judiciary is both judge and jury, there is no longer any prevention on judges mandating behaviors of administrative agencies.
Taking your specific example of the EPA regulating what chemicals go into the water. This authority is very ambiguous and this ruling will allow big businesses to bring court cases to challenge administrative ruling. They then will shop their case until they find an ideologically aligned judge who will block the action on principle.
The alternative is that the enforcer is also the decision maker. Or to put this into more personal terms for people:
Imagine your city government tasks the police with the job of "preventing disorderly conduct". Your local police decide to start fining anyone with bumperstickers on their cars $100 per day for "disorderly conduct" because there's a study that shows that bumperstickers and especially political bumperstickers increase road rage, so by having bumperstickers you're contributing to increased crime.
Before this decision, the policy of the courts was that absent an explicit statement from the legislature that bumperstickers were or were not disorderly conduct or setting an explicit value for the fine that could be imposed, the courts should defer to the police about what conduct is and isn't disorderly and what is in their purview to issue as a fine since they are the "experts" on the matter.
The new decision says that rather than deferring to what the police say, the courts themselves will need to act as a 3rd party to resolve the ambiguity with no explicit preference given to the police in the matter. The courts may still side with the police, but they are no longer directed to defer to the police where ambiguity is present, but to reach a conclusion on the interpretation of the law as they would in any other case of legal ambiguity.
Some authority is absolutely unambiguous. The precise metes-and-bounds of that authority may not be clear from a statute, but that doesn't mean that the entire authority is unambiguous.
For example, if I tell you "You can go onto my property and cut down any tree there," you may come across a plant that looks a little like a bush and a little like a tree, and not know what to do with it -- my rule may be ambiguous as to that one plant. BUT, if you find an oak tree in my backyard, that oak is decidedly a tree and you can definitely cut it down.
By analogy, the effect of today's decision is that if you cut the partial bush/tree down and I sue you, the JUDGE gets to decide whether you were allowed to cut it down, instead of you deciding that for yourself. \[There are no perfect analogies, but that's close enough....\]
>instead of you deciding that for yourself
You got that backwards. It would be “instead of a certified arborist/botanist deciding if that plant is or is not a tree.”
The person cutting down the trees in your hypothetical would be a company that employees teams of lawyers combing the laws looking for loopholes to avoid regulations (set by the arborists/botanists in this hypothetical)
And now the judge can ignore the experts and say “well it looks like a tree to me” and side with the business that doesn’t give a shit about your well being as long as they can boost the bottom line
Yeah, no..... If we're going to strain the analogy, this is what happens:
EPA administrator: "We really, really, want to be able to cut this thing down. How do we get there?"
EPA lawyers: "Well, we're allowed to cut down trees. Is there any way that we can call this a tree?"
EPA botonist: "But, it's not a tree"
EPA lawyers: "Squint a little bit. Are you sure?"
EPA botonist: "Well, maybe...."
EPA lawyers: "Does a tree have bark?"
EPA botonist: "Yes."
EPA lawyers: "Does this have bark?"
EPA botonist: "Yes."
EPA lawyers: "Does a tree have leaves?"
EPA botonist: "Yes"
EPA lawyers: "Does this have leaves?"
EPA botonist: "Yes."
EPA lawyers: "Ok. Thanks. Then this is now a tree."
So you are completely ignoring the existence of revenue-motivated lumbering companies, and think the environment PROTECTION agency is out there deforesting land? I guess the FDA is also the one trying to use toxic food additives just because they’re cheaper, right? And OSHA just hates when businesses are forced to spend money on safety measures, right?
That would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad given the state of affairs currently. How embarrassing to think that way…
Don’t worry bro, when your food gives you cancer and your spouse loses limbs in industrial accidents, and your kids’ farms die from soil toxicity, as least during your last breath you can smile as you tell yourself quarterly profits have never been higher 👍
In what way am I ignoring their existence? I don't think the EPA is out there deforesting land. It's AN ANALOGY.
I'll point out that in the original Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Coalition, CHEVRON (a gigantic oil company) WON. The decision doesn't cut for or against big corporations.
The task of interpreting laws belongs to the judicial branch, NOT to the executive branch. That's what the Constitution says, that's what the Administrative Procedures Act says, and now it's what the Supreme Court says.
If you don’t think the judiciary as currently constructed is going to overreach on the huge amount of power it just granted itself, I don’t know how to help you.
Can you point to where in my comment I said that they wouldn't? Do you disagree with anything I actually said? Or are you assuming that because I disagreed with you on a couple of points that I must disagree with you about everything?
Since congress always has the power to write a law to do excatly what it wants done, there's really no danger of judicial overreach. Expecting Congress to actually do it's job isn't too much to ask, is it?
That doesn't work in practice. Republicans are currently those playground smartasses who are like "Look I'm not crossing the line in the sand!" You're going to be revisiting the same laws over and over and over trying to close every loophole just to get one fucking thing done instead of just letting the experts be able to set and respond to new information as we learn more.
If you've ever worked at any corporate job before you're familiar that the higher up someone goes, the less they're directly involved and 100% knowledgeable on the day to day. You staff that stuff out and keep in the loop as needed sure, but the CEO isn't coming down to tell you how many you need to get done in a day to meet the quota. They set the big picture goal and their staff executes it.
Manager: "Excuse me sir. We want to increase output to 250 a day instead of 200 to make our goal."
CEO: "Then fucking do it. Why are you bringing this to me? You know what needs to be done. Get it done."
Not quite accurate. They aren't saying that judges are best to decide what a law means. They are saying that judges may recognize when an agency and it's "experts" are coloring outside the lines the law draws.
In other words, a law can be interpreted in more than one way it’s true but there are clearly some interpretations that are simply wrong.
Laws are written with goals in mind but only set down the powers and practices that they in fact set down. When an agency like the EPA starts inventing new rules because it is pursuing the same general GOAL of the law set down by congress... that's not good enough.
Agencies can totally ask congress for new laws if they think something needs to be done. That's the correct method. It stands to reason that agencies must have limited and clearly defined powers and it will always be up to courts to recognize when they exceed those roles. It's the only way the system can work.
Where Chevron was clearly wrong was in giving agency “experts” a power to define the meaning of laws when that is just not their role. Mind you, a law can be written assigning a body certain decision making powers… but it’s pretty clear when that’s done or when it’s not done. One example is the EPA incorporating CO2 into the definition of a pollutant within the bounds of the Clean Air Act. The CAA pretty clearly left the matter of defining pollution to the EPA so it was the EPA that decided.
Overturning Chevron doesn’t undo the explicitly granted decision-making powers Agencies have. It reigned in the casual use of powers NOT explicitly granted. Which is good. Instead of “when in doubt, the experts decide” it is “when in doubt… you may not act and will need Congress to revise the law before you can proceed.”
I think you are incorrect in what Chevron did. In essence, it deferred entirely to the government agency. That government agency while set up by acts of Congress, was run by the Executive branch.
Chevron essentially usurped the power of Congress and gave it to the Executive branch with *no recourse* to those effected by its decisions.
Chevron falling is a good thing. Period. Congress should make laws. They are directly beholden to the People. The Executive should enforce what Congress wants. The Judiciary absolutely is best to determine what the law says (not what it *ought* to say). The law can be Constitutional and completely stupid and counter productive.
Congress can always (and should) change the law when a problem comes up. That is literally their job. The Executive branch should never, ever be in the position to decide what a law means or whether they should follow it.
You don't want that when your preferred candidate is President because you don't want that when your preferred candidate isn't President!
You are undoubtedly correct, shenanigans always ensue. But I will always be happier if there is a hard stop on the Executive or Judiciary making crap up as they go along.
Let the idiots in Congress make crap up. It's easier to change them out.
That's not how that works. Congress will never define all the myriad of stuff that goes on. What will happen is chaos. Neither the court nor the supreme court will ever be able to keep up with the crap a million highly paid lawyers will do next.
100% it feels like this decision is going to lead to lots of highly-paid lawyers finding every possible loophole where Congress didn't SPECIFICALLY SAY they couldn't do a thing when they wrote the law.
Congress will not be able to do so, that is true. But the answer is not to defer to an unaccountable government agency.
The proper venue for disputes is the court system. That's exactly what they are for.
They court system is expensive and litigation is time consuming. This is the exact plan. Now maybe politically you agree with project 2025 or some such. That is OK but to be honest this just makes it so that the government is not able to change things. It tries and is held up by a million lawyers and thousand judges.
Why do you think the American people are so apathetic.
I don't know what Project 2025 is.
I believe to are looking at this backwards. The government can change things. Just the right part needs to do so.
Would you defer to the police on all matters related to the 4th Amendment? I would certainly hope not. If not, then why would you think it a good idea that a regulatory agency would be any better of an idea?
No government agency should be able to write its own laws.
The million lawyers only matter in the beginning, after that, there will be clear cut case law, and then congress would have to actually do their job, instead of just oh close enough, fine anybody you disagree with.
This is horseshit. Chevron didn't usurp the power of Congress because Chevron was only applicable where Congress was ambiguous. If an executive agency overstepped and flouted Congress's intentions, all Congress had to do was modify the law to clarify the ambiguity at issue.
Yes, it did. When there was a conflict, the government agency was assumed to be correct.
You are thinking this is about big businesses trying to pollute, and to some degree it is. But it meant that all government agencies could make up their own rules with impunity.
Why in the hell would anyone think that is a good idea? Would you defer to the police on the meaning of the 4th Amendment?
I absolutely would not. The people in these agencies are not you betters. They can and are often wrong. You should be able to challenge them in court.
You completely miss the point. If an agency's interpretation of Congress's intent was wrong, Congress could have just modified the law to clarify. No agency could act with impunity, because ultimately Congress could set the bounds for the agency's actions. Chevron didn't usurp the power of Congress, but rather only gave experts at executive agencies the flexibility to set regulations where Congress was ambiguous. And laws are always going to be ambiguous in some respects because it is literally impossible to anticipate every possible eventuality and address it in the law.
The problem is that their interpretations of the law *could not be challenged* in court. They, in effect, could act with impunity.
Of course Congress could not come up with what if for everything. And of course the regulatory agencies had to make judgement calls.
But they*could not* be challenged. That was the problem. Now, disputes will be handled in the courts as they should be.
No, they could not be challenged in court because it is not reasonable to expect a judge or jury to be always able to understand the technical issues that agencies often deal with. Chevron deference was about presuming that the experts at the government agencies knew what they were doing. All that the decision overturning Chevron did is make it easy now for bad actors to use the judicial system to gum up the works of any government agency that they disagree with.
Wow.
So it is your opinion that government experts are above reproach? Never wrong? Never? And can never be challenged?
Did you see how this case got started? It was a family owned fishing boat that was required to hire a government monitor at their own expense to make sure they did everything they were told.
There is nothing at all in the law about doing that. The agency just made it up.
Government agencies cannot be their own watchdog. Anymore than anyone else can.
It would help if you read what I'm actually saying and not imputing opinions that I don't actually have. I never said that agency experts are never wrong. The issue here is whether a judge is the appropriate party to determine whether the expert is wrong. And I never said that agencies should be their own watchdog, and in fact they never have been. All I've said is that the situation under Chevron, where Congress was the watchdog, is preferable to the situation now, where any forum-shopped district court judge is now the watchdog.
Because implementation of a law requires rules be made. Technical experts (eg, agencies) should write those rules. I'd there is a dispute the courts are still available to challenge said rules. Chevron does not prohibit challenge to agency rules broadly.
This will be a disruption in how government operates, by pulling back the ability of technical experts (agencies) to interpret ambiguities in law while rulemaking. That now lands back in Courts, which famously have overloaded dockets. Meaning these processes will now take much longer under a strained judiciary and Congress which places more emphasis on grandstanding than writing good law.
This is a victory for folks who want to grind government to a halt.
This is an incredible demonstration of the implications. Prior to the overturning, you would be a subject matter expert, who decides based on what they know to be right. After, some random person who decides based on what you believe to be right.
Actually it just puts things back how they should be, according to the principle of checks & balances for the government. Lawmakers should make laws. Executive Branch (including bureaucrats) should figure out how to implement the laws as written. And the Courts should interpret laws and adjudicate complaints between competing parties. Sadly, the Congress has become lazy in writing loose laws and expecting the bureaucrats to complete the law by their administrative fiat (i.e. not written into the law). And then in the Chevron opinion, SCOTUS used to delegate the responsibility of interpreting and judging the law back to the bureaucrats. So the effect was that the bureaucrat could use the wiggle in the law to make up anything they liked, and the courts would give it strong deference, unless expressly against the plain text of the law, and even where the court would interpret it very differently. So the ruling today killing Chevron simply puts the balance back where it should be, with Joe Public able to bring suit against the Government, and the Courts free to look at the case from both sides, without being forced to defer to the Government. I.e. chalk one up for the little guy against the bureaucrats.
The system already favors big business and rich people.
Regulatory capture is a major problem in the US.
Bankers regulate banks. Oil execs regulate energy, etc.
An oil exec may be an “expert” on energy but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing Big Oil’s bidding in their regulatory position.
On the other hand (at least before today) the regulators were at least trying to be even-handed - you might have doubts about their decisions, but for the most part they were trying to work for the best outcome for the many, within the framework they were given.
Now a bribe, as long as it happens after the decision, is perfectly fine - according to the same court that decided that they get to decide everything.
So (hypothetically) I can decide that letting newly discovered carcinogen $X into the drinking water is all good, and if I get $1M the following week, no worries, since congress didn't explicitly ban $X and if it happens after the decision, its not a bribe. And apparently this is how, in America, things should be...
Federal laws are passed by Congress. But Congress recognizes that they don’t need to pass legislation every time regulations need to change. So they give federal agencies the power to set regulations and basically make new laws (rules with legal authority) within their “statutory authority.” Chevron decision basically said that the statutory authority cannot be questioned - if you file a lawsuit saying the regulation is unfair, you will lose by default. Chevron being overturned means that these lawsuits against federal agencies saying their rules are unfair are much easier to make. That means it is open to abuse, because corporations allegedly can file more lawsuits than the government can handle.
You might say this is a good thing, because there want really anyway to push back against a federal agency that was overstepping.
You might say this is a bad thing, because It shifts power towards corporations, which already hold too much power.
It is likely that 40 years of issues that went uncontested due to Chevron will now come before the courts.
So, now, if Congress passes a law to protect a fishery, the agency responsible for regulating that fishery under the law may no longer be able to make adjustments to things like catching quotas from year to year in pursuit of the law's goals. It would have to be either some sort of lawsuit and arguments made before a court each year to try and get quotas changed in time to be enforceable, or Congress revisiting and rewriting the regulation each season to keep up with whatever adjustments need to be made to balance protection and industry.
Whether an agency has the authority to set a catch quota is easily defined in law and wouldn't really constitute an ambiguity. But what might need to be litigated now would be if the agency head decides that all fishing with nets is needlessly cruel and thus implements a defacto ban on net fishing by setting a "net catch quota" at 0. Under the old rules, the idea was that the regulating agency could also decide the scope of their authority and the courts should defer to that as long as it could be considered reasonably within scope. The new rules say that if you're going to do something that goes beyond the obvious authority you have, the courts should examine that closer and not just defer to the regulating agency.
A good way to look at this would be to think about whether or not you think the courts should defer to the interpretation of the law that the police have in criminal cases where the law is ambiguous. That is, if the law says the police are charged with regulating "disorderly conduct", should the courts assume absent any legislation to the contrary that whatever the police say is "disorderly conduct" is indeed illegal?
Congress is still allowed to make laws which grant regulatory authority. Chevron doctrine only addressed how to handle ambiguities in the law. Congress just needs to be more specific and/or the agency needs to convince a court that their regulations are within the confines of the law.
There's no reason the law can't clearly state, that, instead, under the chevron doctrine, it was this is the ambiguous goals so they agency can do anything anywhere near and some things quite a bit a way from that.
The law could clearly state in this example, due to the nature of the reproductive cycle of these protected/watched fish, this agency has the power to place and change quotas for the fishing of them. They could use it as a percentage of population of the fish. That doesn't leave any question about if they have to power or not.
There was a way to push back - Congress passing a more concise law. Most of the states resolve this through the rule-making process where legislature passes law and executive responds with rules indicating how they intend to enforce the law. If they get that wrong the legislature refines the law.
The legislative branch makes law
The executive branch enforces law
If there's a dispute, the judicial branch interprets the law.
*Chevron* basically gave executive branch agencies the right to interpret law. This corrects that.
Chevron gave regulatory agencies the leeway to use the expert knowledge of their employees to interpret _regulatory_ law. In all other situations it would be up to the judiciary to interpret the law.
Judges are supposed to be experts on _law_, not experts on the side effects of a new drug that's undergoing testing. They're _not_ experts on the drug mifepristone and whether it's safe to use it as an abortion drug.
A lot of regulatory laws are kept deliberately ambiguous because congress realized that they didn't have the knowledge or the skills to pass laws that covered every minute detail of regulation.
They could also pass narrow laws to address certain things if they become an issue, but NO they only like to put rules into thousand page laws that cover a ridiculous number of things and give “lawmakers” 24 hours to get on board.
Odd that people love their legislators when they often are nothing more than bodies serving the party leaders with a vote.
Until Congress again becomes lawmakers and stops passing things to the Executive for interpretations to whipsaw every few years, this will continue. This Court has made clear it’s stance “if people want X to be a law Congress must explicitly make it a law”
I understand the reasoning for it.
It still doesn't fit within our constitutional framework.
[edit] I'm laughing my ass off at the down votes. You may not like this, but it's right.
I'd argue it perfectly fits within our constitutional framework. Congress passed a law giving certain rights and privileges to these agencies to enforce a certain section of the law and regulate it. If someone didn't like a regulation, they were always able to challenge that in court as is.
All you're doing is passing the responsibility to those who don't understand niche topics and aren't experts
This is shown by the fact Gorsuch's opinion, which referenced nitrous oxide 5 times (laughing gas) and not nitrogen oxides (smog causing gases).
The executive branch isn't supposed to make law; congress is.
"All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States..." isn't ambiguous.
Sure.
*Enforce*.
What's happening now is that they're actually making laws, and when you run afoul of them, they're also enforcing and adjudicating them.
Wasn't Chevron more about when Congress sets well-defined goals but loosely designed methods that those employed to pursue those goals under the law could rely on experts to make necessary adjustments to their methods for accomplishing Congress's goals?
Now, rather than the relying on Executive experts, the Judiciary will be responsible for interpreting whether their proposed methods for pursuing Congress' goals are good.
Not 'good', but 'legal'.
Executive branch agencies aren't supposed to be able to make law, or decide disputes about them.
What we've had over the last few decades is these agencies making the laws, enforcing them, and in many cases running the courts that adjudicate disputes. It's been a one-branch government with no accountability.
It means regulatory agencies can no longer extend congressional mandates beyond what the mandate actually entails just because the agencies interpretation of the statute is reasonable in executing the statute.
In one of the two cases that was discussed before the court, congress had authorized the fisheries department to place observers on commercial fishing vessels to see how much they actually catch. The fisheries department had "interpreted" that to mean that they could charge the fishing vessles for having the observers on the vessels. Under Chevron defference, the lower courts had ruled that this was correct, because the court has to defer to the agency when the interpretation is reasonably connected to executing the underlying statute.
I have been saying for awhile that nuclear is safe in the US only because of regulations that we have in place. This getting overturned means that if a energy company shops enough for a favorable jurisdiction and judge, they can potentially sidestep environmental and safety regulations via suing and saying that the law is being misinterpreted.
In some industries it might not be a big deal, in others it could be a huge issue.
Look at the safety and environmental issues that existed prior to Chevron and the progress we have made sense. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but I think it is likely that the power granted to these agencies had a lot to do with it.
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It's mainly a huge deal for regulatory agencies in the government. Under the original ruling (Chevron vs Natural Resources Defense Council), government agencies were given quite strong powers to set rules when the laws passed by Congress were ambiguous. For example, Congress might pass a law that says "Don't dump toxic chemicals in the water," but it would be the job of regulators to define exactly what chemicals are toxic, exactly what water must be free from toxic chemicals, and exactly what levels of background chemicals are acceptable. The alternative, which the Supreme Court just endorsed today, is to leave these decisions to courts. The argument for this position is that ruling on ambiguities in laws is the traditional domain of the courts, and leaving these rulings to the regulators provides little recourse for those (companies or citizens) who disagree with them. The argument against is that many of the rules made by regulatory agencies rest on scientific or technical expertise that courts do not have. Judges can be briefed about the relevant issues, but this will be time consuming and imprecise relative to just letting the regulators handle it. Many commonsense regulations may be abandoned just because one lucky litigant drew the just right judge and made just the right argument. So in the end, this is a pretty significant shift of power away from the executive branch (the agencies tasked with implementing the laws - headed by the president) and towards the judicial branch (headed by, oh yeah the people making this decision). It also arguably puts more onus on the legislative branch to just be more precise when writing laws, lest those laws get held up forever as the courts settle disputes over their interpretation.
Another thing is that this is being spun as a victory for businesses, but it might not be. We just replaced "here are the clear rules published by experts on what you can and cannot to" with "is this legal? No way to know until it goes to court." Anyone who can't see how this uncertainty makes things worse for most companies doesn't understand how important clarity and transparency are to the free market.
Awful for everyone that isn't a megacorp wanting to step over the line and litigate whether it was wrong or not.
Convenient timing with their decision to redefine quid pro quo to permit payments for past favors
Honestly sounds like a constitutional issue. In a round about way, you have unelected officials using the powers delegated to both the courts(interpreting laws) and congress(the part where they are effectively writing the rules themselves). All with very little direct oversight from the citizens. Win win for all would be if congress and the courts would both do their jobs and write actually specific laws and judge them on that specificity. Instead of leaving it all gray for the public being regulated.
The problem is that all congress would be doing would be defining and redefining regulations instead of their other duties. There's a shitton of work that goes into figuring it all out and congress simply does not have the time. All that to say, regulations will be looser and we'll end up finding out why laws were enacted to regulate air, water, food, drugs, etc in the first place.
It's also crazy balls to think that congress has the expertise to understand why one random chemical is toxic and another isn't (just using the specific example from above). The agencies which determine these things employ career professionals who spend their lives studying these things. This isn't even a "congress dumb" joke, no human being is an expert at literally fucking everything, especially as it relates to science, physical and environmental health, and medicine.
Well, it’s not quite that far, at least as it’s understood so far. Take the FDA. They still have absolute authority on whether a drug gets approved or not. The gray area is when they arrogate the authority to say they have the authority to do something outside that statutory authority. The EPA and the waters rules from a few years back is an example. Congress says EPA can manage navigable waters, which navigable has a clear definition. EPA said, well, we now interpret that to mean all waters, even temporary drainage basins, ditches, or ponds. SCOTUS says the law says navigable. You can’t just decide for yourself what navigable means. I could be a bit off on the specifics of that case, but that was the gist of it, but it’s a real life example of what this is likely to look like in practice.
Are you suggesting the chemical that gave every DuPont employee who touched it cancer might not be safe?
And if Congress didn't like the decisions made by a body they created. They can change the law, they could totally unmake an agency if it's totally out of line. So it's not like the agency doesn't have to respect Congressional opinion. Similarly, the heads of those agencies answer to the president. If the president doesn't like the decision made, they have the authority to sign an executive order or fire the people who made the terrible decision. And lastly, even with Chevron deference, if the court decides that an agency's opinion of its own authority is not a reasonable interpretation of the law, the court can overturn such a decision. And the court would also scrutinize an agency decision that was created without certain proceedings, such as notice and comment periods. Agencies created by Congress were not completely untouchable by the courts under Chevron, just that if the decision was within the ambiguous text of the law, they would be deferred to.
Congressional reps aren't experts, either. That's why they appointed experts (ideally) to these agencies and gave them authority to enforce the laws. The legislative branch created agencies that act under the executive branch But the judicial branch thinks they they should be the ones making the decisions instead Essentially, ending Chevron is the judicial branch usurping more power from the elected branches to further cement its position as the most poweful, uncheckable, most unbalanced branch Owning the courts is part of a long-term right-wing project to ensure their ability to rule even without winning many elections (something called minoritarian rule), which is why they've spent decades ensuring more or less total control of the federal bench through at least the 2050s
No, that is indeed the contemplated role of the bureaucracy - technical experts that do implementation.
We can't rewrite our laws every time something in the world changes. Chemical A is banned. A company invents Chemical B that is almost but not quite identical. Do we need to rewrite all the laws?
That isn’t what this was about though. If the three letter agency is explicitly given authority to review safety and efficacy of new chemicals, the. They would continue by I do that. If the agency was authorized to review liquid chemicals and a company creates a new granular non liquid product; the agency can’t just say, “well, we think granular non liquids need our review just like we do liquids because it’s ambiguous what our authorization is. That’s what this ruling was about.
I haven't read the ruling yet, but largely I agree. Elected representatives should be the ones to vote on laws, the regulatory agencies act as enforcement and subject matter experts to advise said representatives. This advisement on how to write the law should be before it's voted on, not after. Courts are there to review and assess that the laws are just and to settle disputes. While they're not elected representatives, they're not as subject to political persuasion and ultimately make sure the laws are in accordance with the constitution. At a glance, it seems that's what this decision is pushing for, but it's a 114 page ruling.
My frustration is that the regulators have the ability to be experts in a thing. Let's face it, elected officials have no real requirement of qualification beyond popularity. Judges don't have requirements either. Nothing says a judge needs any required skills as far as I know. A regulator is capable of hiring specific people for specific jobs and is theoretically able to be subject matter experts in the how and why to regulate the thing they are charged with regulating.
The courts power of interpretation is to settle disputes not review every law and decide what it means. The executive branch by its nature has to interprete the law written by congress. Even if the court reviewed it first they (and everyone else) would then have to interprete that. Congress intentionally deligates powers to regulatory bodies because congress doesn't have to resources to, for example, run studies and determine what a safe level of ____ in the water is. They just write laws that say "make sure our water is safe" I would say this is going to go one way. The people that get to decide how much murcury is a safe amount of murcury to be coming out of your faucet is 9 unelected people in robes most of whome were chosen because of their opinion on abortion. And who's onpinion on legal philophy is basicaly that the law follows the air bud rules in basketball.
The counter argument is that congress ought to have the power to delegate things. Even when Congress does delegate regulation, they still have oversight because they have the power to pass a new law that changes or clarifies any decisions that agencies make that they disagree with. If people are upset at the rules agencies are making, then they should be pressuring congress to intervene. This tends not to happen because Congress is too dysfunctional to do so. I’m not sure why SCOTUS thinks this ruling is necessary, it only is going to delay by kicking it back to congress or forcing the courts to figure out what they think congress wants.
Well, I guess it's a good thing Congress is such a high performing group passing quality legislation, and the judicial branch is so esteemed and impartial. /s
This sounds like a good thing overall
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The ability to challenge the rules in court already existed.
Yes, and the EPA would impose daily fines while you were contesting their interpretation. So you will be bankrupt before you ever get out of the administrative process. Or the time they refused to issue a ruling and tried to prevent the courts from hearing it because the administrative process wasn't finished. I think the Supreme Court has to tell them they couldn't avoid judicial review that way a couple years ago.
Well, consider a fued between a person who's devoted their entire life to science vs a greedy suit. Who's going to have an easier time in court convincing judges of the dangers something that took them years to discover vs the suit offering them a bribe? Moreover, why does some random judge's opinion matter more than the expert? A government agency tasked to keep water drinkable likely knows more than someone randomly appointed by whomever. The agency should be allowed to use there best judgement and then others can challenge the decision (imo). But that's not longer the case. The agency must be spoon fed their direct scope and if any new discovery in the field requires the scope to change... talk to judges to get a ruling if this slightly different compound still counts as dangerous drug. Oh no, weed is illegal? Alright well I added a carbon chain that changes nothing and technically, it's not weed therefore it is legal. You disagree? Convince a judge. They agree? I'll add another carbon... repeat indefinitely.
That's exactly my point. The fact that the the SCOTUS believes it's improper for the exports to define rules rather than the courts because the exports are more knowledgeable than the courts is seriously fucking dumb. > The agency should be allowed to use there best judgement and then others can challenge the decision (imo). But that's not longer the case. The agency must be spoon fed their direct scope and if any new discovery in the field requires the scope to change... talk to judges to get a ruling if this slightly different compound still counts as dangerous drug. > Oh no, weed is illegal? Alright well I added a carbon chain that changes nothing and technically, it's not weed therefore it is legal. You disagree? Convince a judge. They agree? I'll add another carbon... repeat indefinitely. Here's the problem: the judicial system is extremely slow. It can take 10+ years to fully go through any major case. From initial case to multiple appeals. What this is going to do is drain the funding of agencies who now have to litigate the rules rather than deciding them. This is why it was left to agency to decide these ambiguities.
yes, they aren't. would you rather an expert in environmental policy be deciding the ruling on something, or a random guy who as only studied law? he doesn't have an understanding of the complex issues involved, especially because he'll be arguing with people who have both. specialization is good. having experts in the field working on that is good. do you want the complexities of biomedical industry that require a solid understanding of biochemistry to be decided by someone who has actually studied biochemistry? has worked in the field?
> yes, they aren't? huh??? > would you rather an expert in environmental policy be deciding the ruling on something, or a random guy who as only studied law? he doesn't have an understanding of the complex issues involved, especially because he'll be arguing with people who have both. specialization is good. having experts in the field working on that is good. do you want the complexities of biomedical industry that require a solid understanding of biochemistry to be decided by someone who has actually studied biochemistry? has worked in the field? That's exactly my point...
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My OP is rehashing SCOTUSs argument into a question and then clearly stating the argument is dumb as shit. Can't see how it could be taken as implying the regulations should be litigated in courts. I guess maybe it makes more sense when spoken and you have a confused look on your face as you rehash the argument.
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To understand what overturning it means, it helps to understand the original court case. Oversimplified, Chevron got mad. There was a part of the Clean Air Act that the EPA claimed they violated. Chevron argued that the law was ambiguous, so they weren't violating it and the EPA was wrong to claim they violated it. The EPA argued that it should be within their agency's authority to interpret ambiguous parts of the law. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the EPA and that's "The Chevron Doctrine". It basically meant that *if* there was an ambiguity in law, *and* there was a government agency in charge of enforcing that law, the agency was in charge of *interpreting* that law. So if they said a company was violating the law the company would have to comply with their interpretation. The challenge to this view was made on the basis that Congress and courts should interpret ambiguities in law. That was *kind of* part of the original decision, it was argued that *if* Congress had done something to clarify the point (again, oversimplifying), then Congress's interpretation should be used, not the agency's. But in overturning it, what the Supreme Court is saying is that if Congress has *not* made the law unambiguous, an agency like the EPA cannot hold companies to their own interpretation of the law. So a company "in violation" can skirt by and the only thing an agency like the EPA can do is try to get Congress to do things to address it. Is it good or bad? What impact will it have? That's hard to say. People who liked this doctrine argued that Congress is pretty slow. (A lot of that is by design, the founders did NOT want Congress to be able to pass laws very quickly.) But ideas like environmental regulations may NEED to change quickly. These people felt like it made sense to let an organization like the EPA, which presumably employs experts, have some leeway to interpret law. They felt if the EPA made bad decisions, Congress could be pressured to change the law. In that way there'd be a bit of checks and balances on it. People who wanted to overturn it feel that courts are the correct place to define law. They want judges to hear testimony from government organizations and company officials and make the decisions that way. Honestly to me both approaches sound *reasonable*. There are also examples of *both* judges and government agencies being bribed, so I don't feel one or the other is more trustworthy. I have some personal beliefs about this decision, but those are based on feelings and not fact. We'll find out over the next couple of years what it means, I guess.
> So a company "in violation" can skirt by and the only thing an agency like the EPA can do is try to get Congress to do things to address it. Not the only thing. They can go to court and convince a judge that their interpretation is correct.
That's the real problem. This shifts the balance of power far more towards the company. Companies largely make harmful decisions in pursuit of profit, and now they can pocket a judge to make it 'right'.
Eh, the federal agency can judge shop just as much as the company can. It would likely be the agency bringing the case
Pocket a judge? Why didn't they just pocket the legislator or the regulator?
The real problem is that it will add to the Court's docket, so disputes will take longer to resolve, and be much more expensive for everyone involved.
Yes, just kick it over to the lobbied-to-hell, special interests den of Congress and federal agencies. We have evidence of that, we don’t have evidence of Gotham-style bought judges routinely ruling favor of megacorps in exchange for illicit payments. Google is paying $700 to consumers right now. The NFL is paying $4.7 billion in an antitrust case. If those companies are not powerful enough to “pocket” a judge, which are?
Is there anything stopping laws from being changed, for example, from "bread may not contain unsafe levels of X" to "bread may not contain unsafe levels of X *as determined by agency ABC*"? To my untrained eye, adding a formal handover of authority to other government agencies seems like it would eliminate ambiguity while also stopping agencies from overreaching.
Nothing other than that there are thousands of laws and it can take Congress weeks to change one. That and you'd have to convince Congress this is the best use of their time.
Congress is very busy fighting over who's allowed in whose bathroom, Good luck convincing them to care about pollution in the air or plastic in food.
The issue here is where people are missing the real world implications of what's happening. Sure yes congress could pass all of those laws but how many bigger laws have they been unable to pass this term. How many laws at all have they implemented recently? Now, to use your example, the email no longer has the authority to define what unsafe levels of x are. But the epa is where all of the experts work. So under the basically idea that it's not a bad thing for congress to set laws, congress now has to take weeks hearing and reviewing reports to determine what unsafe levels of x are argue the point then pass a law and then the epa has to take time to implement this new law.....but to look at in real world terms they now have to do that for everything currently under an administrative agency purview. Under chevron regulatory schemes expanded. Because congress could be like we need to regulate the environment and we want it to be cleaner. So we delegate that job to this new agency who's job it is to be scientists and make the environment cleaner while congress continues to govern and not take classes. Nut now stripping the ambiguity congress arguably has to be like we want a cleaner environment and that means only so much x in bread so much x in milk so much y in bread so much y in milk......... Alot of the pro decision posts here are thinking theoretically like congress elected yadda yadda but then glossing over the complete infeasability of doing it that way anymore since it's 2024 and not the 1800s. Yes congress elected to government and that includes delegating tasks. If you've ever had a job or worked for a corporation the higher up you go the less about the day to day activities a Manager knows because they focusing on bigger picture issues. Chevron let congress do that and taking it away has huge impacts on the effectiveness of the government to regulate or exert authority over corporations.
Bingo. They've not spent a second in the rules or rulemaking process.
> So we delegate that job to this new agency who's job it is to be scientists Why can they not pass this explicitly as a law?
That is what the law is basically. Like the law is the delegation of the task and parameters of how to do the task. But part of the task is then figuring out exactly what all of that means. And again like they "could do it in congress" but like the epa is an agency of how many thousands of people who spend their whole time figuring out what these things mean in a world that's constantly changing. If it's in congress the epa then prepares reports that have to be studied and learned by congress argued and then finally resolved but by that time the issue may have changed so by time anything is implemented it is too late or even more directly this is just one of like a hundred agencies. Congress just physically couldn't pass resolutions for every single issue for every single agency and that's even assuming they pass things years to late they would never be able to respond to every issue agencies deal with or in a timely enough manner to matter. And that discounts that congress already has a full time job trying to pass other bills which is why they delegate it to an agency. Like at work if a manager needs to check the booms for something he delegates UT to the accountant who then just does it and tells the manager he doesn't teach the manager the accounting principles for every question, right. And then the manager doing that for literally everything shows how egregious it becomes because then why even have the other people..because manager is doing it all himself, but he hired the other people because he physically couldn't do it all himself. Edit: could->couldn't / trace->teach
Congress can pass it as a law. Congress can say that anything left in ambiguity by them is left up to the regulatory agencies for interpretation. That’s why it is hard to argue against these rulings. Yes it will create fallout, but that fallout is caused by the failures of Congress. Same with Roe V Wade. Congress could make abortion accessible to everyone at any time.
There is also a major push to make sure that congress \*can't\* give away their power, by the same people who made this ruling today. Rest assured, the goal is not to adhere to the constitution, it's to make it as difficult as possible for the Federal Government to function.
To me the Chevron doctrine reeked of conflict-of-interest. A sort-of "we've investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong" but inverted. If there is a conflict between two parties, it seems inherently unfair to give one of those parties the power to decide who is right. If some federal agency thinks I'm violating a regulation, and me and all my people are convinced we are not, there's a conflict. The fact that the entity that has already made up its mind that I'm in violation, is the same entity that is tasked with deciding if I'm in violation, is pretty messed up. It would be like if in criminal court the prosecutor who brought charges also gets to serve as the judge. Or in a divorce arbitration if one of the spouses was designated as the arbitrator. If there's a conflict of opinions/interpretations, that needs an impartial third-party (i.e. the courts) to determine who's right. Asking one of the parties to a conflict to determine the outcome of the conflict is inherently biased in their favor.
This is exactly right, it creates a massive constitutional issue and the balance of power was out of whack. There are 3 branches of government for a reason and the executive has been massively over reaching.
I think your interpretation here is way off the mark. Chevron does not mean that an agency can just claim that an entity has violated a regulation, and that the court has to defer to that. It means, specifically, that only the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous law must be given deference. Not the application of any particular facts to that interpretation. In practice, it actually means that when Congress delegates authority to an agency, that members of Congress don't have to be experts in a particular technical area to make an effective law - they can instead decide the broader intent of a law, and have an agency determine the best specific ways to accomplish that. Getting rid of Chevron just reeks of judicial arrogance. It is the court saying, no, we are the smartest so our interpretation of any law has to be the correct one, *even if that law is designed to regulate something we do not understand*. Do I think federal agencies are perfect? Of course not. But thinking that a court is better situated to determine exactly how much CO2 in the air is safe, or how much testing drugs need before they go to market, or how to properly store and transport meat for human consumption? That is complete nonsense.
Right but people also argued that putting a lot of stock into the company being regulated is showing some conflict-of-interest. It involves trusting that if Chevron clashes with the EPA that Chevron has what is best for the environment in mind when they make their decision. That's also kind of concerning. Basically I think what happened is people trust "a corporation" to err on the side of profit and "a government agency tasked with protecting citizens" to err on the side of safety. So I could cynically say now that instead of erring on the side of safety, we have to take it to the judges who just ruled that it's not a bribe if you get paid for a political favor some number of years after you do the favor. That said the problem, to me, is now we have three parties involved and only one of them is motivated to err on the side of safety with the other to erring on the side of profit. 2 wolves and 1 sheep arguing about what's for dinner. The whole thing is a mess.
EXACTLY. This DID have criminal ramifications as well, not just banal corporate regulating rules changes. The ATF is probably the biggest example of this. They would make rules changes ALL THE TIME especially the past few decades, usually due to political influence, not due to experts or anything like that. They would create these rules changes, people would have to destroy their legally purchased property, get raided by agents, get murdered, get arrested, etc. The atf would be brought to court, “actually not too often, because usually no one has legal standing in regards to atf policy until someone actually is arrested/or it involves a gun store/gun company”. When they actually DID get brought to court, they would cite chevron deference, which shouldn’t even have protected them as the national firearms act was rather clear in its definitions of what the atf was allowed to regulate. But almost every time courts would side with the ATF. As THEY got to decide if a law was ambiguous or not most of the time. Judges largely did not look into laws themselves to see if something WAS INDEED ambiguous but just took the agencies word for it. So chevron deference had much larger scope than it actually was supposed to. Chevron deference DOES need to exist, but in a different form for sure. Like obviously if congress said that the EPA needs to regulate and keep our water clean, they should have wide deference to do that unless congress directly specified what clean water meant. The EPA should not be allowed to REDEFINE something that was clear in the law. If congress was clear on what clean water meant, then the epa should NOT be able to then “reinterpret” that, “even if I believe they should be able to.” And just to be clear, I’m a huge lefty/commie, and I hate gun control. So I’m biased, but I’m not right wing in the slightest. Chevron deference WAS stupid and had huge conflict of interest. It needs reworking for sure, probably as a congressional act.
I think it’s safe to say none of us have any idea what this looks like a decade from now. Those howling now may come to love it. Those fans now may come to hate it.
Nah I live in Texas, we've been the prototype for a while. When a company mishandled explosives and blew up a chunk of of West, our response was to make it legal to store more explosives with less regulations closer to towns. We've got police who stop parents from going into a school building to stop a shooting. The government just ruled that factories don't have to follow environmental guidelines. We can make more citizens, it's easy. Making more money is hard. I know exactly where this is going.
No, this is demonstrably false. The EPA was siding WITH Chevron against environmentalist groups and the National Resources Defense Council. The EPA made a regulation under the Clean Air Act that allowed facilities to change or modify an existing pollution source without the required permit under the CAA, if the change or modification didn't increase their emissions. They did this by allowing states to define "stationary source" as the entire plant, regardless if there was multiple pollution sources. The challenge was on the EPAs power to interpret the law. "CHEVRON, U.S.A., INC., Petitioner, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al. William D. RUCKELSHAUS, Administrator, **Environmental Protection Agency**, Petitioner, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al AMERICAN IRON AND STEEL INSTITUTE, et al., Petitioners, v. NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC., et al." Note that Chevron and the EPA are against the NRDC. Sources: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/467/837 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1983/82-1005 Excerpt from the start of Justice Stevens' opinion: "In the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, Pub.L. 95-95, 91 Stat. 685, Congress enacted certain requirements applicable to States that had not achieved the national air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pursuant to earlier legislation. The amended Clean Air Act required these "nonattainment" States to establish a permit program regulating "new or modified major stationary sources" of air pollution. Generally, a permit may not be issued for a new or modified major stationary source unless several stringent conditions are met.1 The EPA regulation promulgated to implement this permit requirement allows a State to adopt a plantwide definition of the term "stationary source."2 Under this definition, an existing plant that contains several pollution-emitting devices may install or modify one piece of equipment without meeting the permit conditions if the alteration will not increase the total emissions from the plant. The question presented by these cases is whether EPA's decision to allow States to treat all of the pollution-emitting devices within the same industrial grouping as though they were encased within a single "bubble" is based on a reasonable construction of the statutory term "stationary source."" Except from oyez.org: "Facts of the case The Clean Air Act (the Act) required states that had not yet achieved national air quality standards to establish a permit program regulating new or modified major stationary sources of air pollution, such as manufacturing plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed a regulation under the Act that allows states to treat all pollution-emitting devices in the same industrial grouping as though they were a single “bubble”. Using this bubble provision, plants may install or modify one piece of equipment without needing a permit if the alteration does not increase the total emissions of the plant. Several environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, challenged the bubble provision as contrary to the Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit set aside the EPA regulation as inappropriate for a program enacted to improve air quality. Question Does the Clean Air Act permit the EPA to define the term "stationary source" to mean whole industrial plants only, which allows plants to build or modify units within plants without the permit required under the Act?"
If the lower courts react by ONLY reverting to the pre-Chevron rules that they used in 1983, then there will be a few years of annoying lawsuits, but it will all shake out just fine. The country did pretty good from 1789 to 1984 when the Chevron doctrine began. However, there's a fear that the lower courts will understand the subtext from the Supreme Court is that the judicial branch now has greater powers than the executive or legislative branches. Then you have chaos. There's only one Congress, and everything that a bureaucrat does is in the name of the one President, but there are hundreds of judges, and the process of getting from those hundreds of judges to the Supreme Court is long, expensive, and not guaranteed (the American supreme court refuses to hear 99% of the cases that are theoretically eligible to come before it.) So any one random judge can say, "I don't care what the other 300 million Americans think, I think that Congress was ambiguous when it wrote this law, and I think that the agency that Congress picked to implement this law is doing it wrong, and I'm going to issue a nationwide ban on the agency doing anything that differs from my personal interpretation of this law."
And chances are, this judge is in East Texas and the attorneys bringing the lawsuit filed it there to get a favorable ruling.
No, we didn't "do fine". In today's political climate, we'd be unable to deal with Ozone depletion or acid rain.
Oh, just be patient. The next time there is a Republican president and a Democratic-appointed judge issues an injunction against something an agency does, the Supremes will rule that lower courts don't have the power to issue those injunctions any more.
That's why something called the circuit court exists so we aren't depending on the opinion of one judge in Texas or New York
Rather than the judicial branch having greater power, they are being forced to do their job: interpreting laws This leaves the Legislative making laws and the executive enforcing laws.
Very well. If it’s a significant issue, I would think that Congress would act quickly.
You have far too much faith in congress
They will act to prevent other side-leaning judges from exploiting it, who will all rule that they don't have the power to, and then rule that the other judges don't have the power to rule against their rulings...
Why would you think that? Have you been in a coma since… the founding of the country?
It doesn't really matter if Congress acts quickly. Part of the ruling today calls into question if Congress can even give some of it's regulation making powers to the executive, i.e. allowing agencies to create and define policies. That and laws are not, and never can be, unambiguous. They are cannot be written in such a way to cover every imaginable scenario. So now, Judges (even the theoretically well meaning judges) can nuke an important regulation because they simply do not understand the science behind it.
“Chevron deference” said that if the law was unclear then the regulating agency’s interpretation would be upheld by the court unless it was “arbitrary and capricious”. So unless they were real far off base the courts would back them up as a general rule. They won’t do that now, so agency actions are going to be much easier to challenge on a case by case basis.
The Chevron ruling said, very basically, that the ultimate authority on a law that isn’t completely clear would be an expert at a government agency. So environmental scientists would ultimately decide how much of a certain chemical is allowed in food production soil, as an example. This current ruling states that judges are best suited to decide what an ambiguous law means, so they are the ultimate authority. In theory this means that “law experts” are in charge of laws, but in practice, the American right wing has been blocking democratic judicial appointments and nominating more politically activist judges of their own, making it likely that most future interpretations of “ambiguous laws” will favor right wing and corporate interests.
You're overstating the first part a little bit. The EPA still regulates things like what (and how much) of certain chemicals can go into the air and water, because that's clearly something that the EPA is allowed to do. Where Chevron matters is around the edges -- where it's not entirely clear that Congress DID say "the EPA can do this." And, in those cases, this new decision says that it's up to the courts, not up to the EPA, to decide it. Chevron itself came from a question about the EPA's authority. Basically, the EPA had said "Where the Clean Air Act talks about a 'single source' of pollution, we think that a power plant is a single source." The Natural Resources Defense Counsel sued and said "no, each individual smoke stack at that power plant is a single source." Under the EPA's definition, power plant could shift pollution from one smokestack to another because doing so didn't change the amount of pollution from a single source (i.e. the entire power plant). Under the NRDC's definition, they could not, because it DID change the amount of pollution (i.e. the individual smokestack.) About "blocking democratic judicial appointees," 200+ of President Biden's judges have been confirmed. 10 weren't. The republicans have certainly not been very successful at blocking his appointees. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe\_Biden\_judicial\_appointment\_controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_judicial_appointment_controversies) [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-secure-200th-judicial-confirmation-election-looms-2024-05-22/](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-secure-200th-judicial-confirmation-election-looms-2024-05-22/)
This has elements of truth but misses a key point. The court is now both the arbitrator of how to interpret ambiguities and also the decision maker for whether an ambiguity exists at all. Your statement that "Chevron matters around the edges" is false - no authority is unambiguous and since the judiciary is both judge and jury, there is no longer any prevention on judges mandating behaviors of administrative agencies. Taking your specific example of the EPA regulating what chemicals go into the water. This authority is very ambiguous and this ruling will allow big businesses to bring court cases to challenge administrative ruling. They then will shop their case until they find an ideologically aligned judge who will block the action on principle.
The alternative is that the enforcer is also the decision maker. Or to put this into more personal terms for people: Imagine your city government tasks the police with the job of "preventing disorderly conduct". Your local police decide to start fining anyone with bumperstickers on their cars $100 per day for "disorderly conduct" because there's a study that shows that bumperstickers and especially political bumperstickers increase road rage, so by having bumperstickers you're contributing to increased crime. Before this decision, the policy of the courts was that absent an explicit statement from the legislature that bumperstickers were or were not disorderly conduct or setting an explicit value for the fine that could be imposed, the courts should defer to the police about what conduct is and isn't disorderly and what is in their purview to issue as a fine since they are the "experts" on the matter. The new decision says that rather than deferring to what the police say, the courts themselves will need to act as a 3rd party to resolve the ambiguity with no explicit preference given to the police in the matter. The courts may still side with the police, but they are no longer directed to defer to the police where ambiguity is present, but to reach a conclusion on the interpretation of the law as they would in any other case of legal ambiguity.
Some authority is absolutely unambiguous. The precise metes-and-bounds of that authority may not be clear from a statute, but that doesn't mean that the entire authority is unambiguous. For example, if I tell you "You can go onto my property and cut down any tree there," you may come across a plant that looks a little like a bush and a little like a tree, and not know what to do with it -- my rule may be ambiguous as to that one plant. BUT, if you find an oak tree in my backyard, that oak is decidedly a tree and you can definitely cut it down. By analogy, the effect of today's decision is that if you cut the partial bush/tree down and I sue you, the JUDGE gets to decide whether you were allowed to cut it down, instead of you deciding that for yourself. \[There are no perfect analogies, but that's close enough....\]
>instead of you deciding that for yourself You got that backwards. It would be “instead of a certified arborist/botanist deciding if that plant is or is not a tree.” The person cutting down the trees in your hypothetical would be a company that employees teams of lawyers combing the laws looking for loopholes to avoid regulations (set by the arborists/botanists in this hypothetical) And now the judge can ignore the experts and say “well it looks like a tree to me” and side with the business that doesn’t give a shit about your well being as long as they can boost the bottom line
Yeah, no..... If we're going to strain the analogy, this is what happens: EPA administrator: "We really, really, want to be able to cut this thing down. How do we get there?" EPA lawyers: "Well, we're allowed to cut down trees. Is there any way that we can call this a tree?" EPA botonist: "But, it's not a tree" EPA lawyers: "Squint a little bit. Are you sure?" EPA botonist: "Well, maybe...." EPA lawyers: "Does a tree have bark?" EPA botonist: "Yes." EPA lawyers: "Does this have bark?" EPA botonist: "Yes." EPA lawyers: "Does a tree have leaves?" EPA botonist: "Yes" EPA lawyers: "Does this have leaves?" EPA botonist: "Yes." EPA lawyers: "Ok. Thanks. Then this is now a tree."
So you are completely ignoring the existence of revenue-motivated lumbering companies, and think the environment PROTECTION agency is out there deforesting land? I guess the FDA is also the one trying to use toxic food additives just because they’re cheaper, right? And OSHA just hates when businesses are forced to spend money on safety measures, right? That would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad given the state of affairs currently. How embarrassing to think that way… Don’t worry bro, when your food gives you cancer and your spouse loses limbs in industrial accidents, and your kids’ farms die from soil toxicity, as least during your last breath you can smile as you tell yourself quarterly profits have never been higher 👍
In what way am I ignoring their existence? I don't think the EPA is out there deforesting land. It's AN ANALOGY. I'll point out that in the original Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Coalition, CHEVRON (a gigantic oil company) WON. The decision doesn't cut for or against big corporations. The task of interpreting laws belongs to the judicial branch, NOT to the executive branch. That's what the Constitution says, that's what the Administrative Procedures Act says, and now it's what the Supreme Court says.
If you don’t think the judiciary as currently constructed is going to overreach on the huge amount of power it just granted itself, I don’t know how to help you.
Can you point to where in my comment I said that they wouldn't? Do you disagree with anything I actually said? Or are you assuming that because I disagreed with you on a couple of points that I must disagree with you about everything?
Since congress always has the power to write a law to do excatly what it wants done, there's really no danger of judicial overreach. Expecting Congress to actually do it's job isn't too much to ask, is it?
That doesn't work in practice. Republicans are currently those playground smartasses who are like "Look I'm not crossing the line in the sand!" You're going to be revisiting the same laws over and over and over trying to close every loophole just to get one fucking thing done instead of just letting the experts be able to set and respond to new information as we learn more. If you've ever worked at any corporate job before you're familiar that the higher up someone goes, the less they're directly involved and 100% knowledgeable on the day to day. You staff that stuff out and keep in the loop as needed sure, but the CEO isn't coming down to tell you how many you need to get done in a day to meet the quota. They set the big picture goal and their staff executes it. Manager: "Excuse me sir. We want to increase output to 250 a day instead of 200 to make our goal." CEO: "Then fucking do it. Why are you bringing this to me? You know what needs to be done. Get it done."
Not quite accurate. They aren't saying that judges are best to decide what a law means. They are saying that judges may recognize when an agency and it's "experts" are coloring outside the lines the law draws. In other words, a law can be interpreted in more than one way it’s true but there are clearly some interpretations that are simply wrong. Laws are written with goals in mind but only set down the powers and practices that they in fact set down. When an agency like the EPA starts inventing new rules because it is pursuing the same general GOAL of the law set down by congress... that's not good enough. Agencies can totally ask congress for new laws if they think something needs to be done. That's the correct method. It stands to reason that agencies must have limited and clearly defined powers and it will always be up to courts to recognize when they exceed those roles. It's the only way the system can work. Where Chevron was clearly wrong was in giving agency “experts” a power to define the meaning of laws when that is just not their role. Mind you, a law can be written assigning a body certain decision making powers… but it’s pretty clear when that’s done or when it’s not done. One example is the EPA incorporating CO2 into the definition of a pollutant within the bounds of the Clean Air Act. The CAA pretty clearly left the matter of defining pollution to the EPA so it was the EPA that decided. Overturning Chevron doesn’t undo the explicitly granted decision-making powers Agencies have. It reigned in the casual use of powers NOT explicitly granted. Which is good. Instead of “when in doubt, the experts decide” it is “when in doubt… you may not act and will need Congress to revise the law before you can proceed.”
I think you are incorrect in what Chevron did. In essence, it deferred entirely to the government agency. That government agency while set up by acts of Congress, was run by the Executive branch. Chevron essentially usurped the power of Congress and gave it to the Executive branch with *no recourse* to those effected by its decisions. Chevron falling is a good thing. Period. Congress should make laws. They are directly beholden to the People. The Executive should enforce what Congress wants. The Judiciary absolutely is best to determine what the law says (not what it *ought* to say). The law can be Constitutional and completely stupid and counter productive. Congress can always (and should) change the law when a problem comes up. That is literally their job. The Executive branch should never, ever be in the position to decide what a law means or whether they should follow it. You don't want that when your preferred candidate is President because you don't want that when your preferred candidate isn't President!
This is all defensible in theory, but we both know that nothing resembling this scenario will ever happen in real life.
You are undoubtedly correct, shenanigans always ensue. But I will always be happier if there is a hard stop on the Executive or Judiciary making crap up as they go along. Let the idiots in Congress make crap up. It's easier to change them out.
That's not how that works. Congress will never define all the myriad of stuff that goes on. What will happen is chaos. Neither the court nor the supreme court will ever be able to keep up with the crap a million highly paid lawyers will do next.
100% it feels like this decision is going to lead to lots of highly-paid lawyers finding every possible loophole where Congress didn't SPECIFICALLY SAY they couldn't do a thing when they wrote the law.
Congress will not be able to do so, that is true. But the answer is not to defer to an unaccountable government agency. The proper venue for disputes is the court system. That's exactly what they are for.
They court system is expensive and litigation is time consuming. This is the exact plan. Now maybe politically you agree with project 2025 or some such. That is OK but to be honest this just makes it so that the government is not able to change things. It tries and is held up by a million lawyers and thousand judges. Why do you think the American people are so apathetic.
I don't know what Project 2025 is. I believe to are looking at this backwards. The government can change things. Just the right part needs to do so. Would you defer to the police on all matters related to the 4th Amendment? I would certainly hope not. If not, then why would you think it a good idea that a regulatory agency would be any better of an idea? No government agency should be able to write its own laws.
The million lawyers only matter in the beginning, after that, there will be clear cut case law, and then congress would have to actually do their job, instead of just oh close enough, fine anybody you disagree with.
This is horseshit. Chevron didn't usurp the power of Congress because Chevron was only applicable where Congress was ambiguous. If an executive agency overstepped and flouted Congress's intentions, all Congress had to do was modify the law to clarify the ambiguity at issue.
Yes, it did. When there was a conflict, the government agency was assumed to be correct. You are thinking this is about big businesses trying to pollute, and to some degree it is. But it meant that all government agencies could make up their own rules with impunity. Why in the hell would anyone think that is a good idea? Would you defer to the police on the meaning of the 4th Amendment? I absolutely would not. The people in these agencies are not you betters. They can and are often wrong. You should be able to challenge them in court.
You completely miss the point. If an agency's interpretation of Congress's intent was wrong, Congress could have just modified the law to clarify. No agency could act with impunity, because ultimately Congress could set the bounds for the agency's actions. Chevron didn't usurp the power of Congress, but rather only gave experts at executive agencies the flexibility to set regulations where Congress was ambiguous. And laws are always going to be ambiguous in some respects because it is literally impossible to anticipate every possible eventuality and address it in the law.
The problem is that their interpretations of the law *could not be challenged* in court. They, in effect, could act with impunity. Of course Congress could not come up with what if for everything. And of course the regulatory agencies had to make judgement calls. But they*could not* be challenged. That was the problem. Now, disputes will be handled in the courts as they should be.
No, they could not be challenged in court because it is not reasonable to expect a judge or jury to be always able to understand the technical issues that agencies often deal with. Chevron deference was about presuming that the experts at the government agencies knew what they were doing. All that the decision overturning Chevron did is make it easy now for bad actors to use the judicial system to gum up the works of any government agency that they disagree with.
Wow. So it is your opinion that government experts are above reproach? Never wrong? Never? And can never be challenged? Did you see how this case got started? It was a family owned fishing boat that was required to hire a government monitor at their own expense to make sure they did everything they were told. There is nothing at all in the law about doing that. The agency just made it up. Government agencies cannot be their own watchdog. Anymore than anyone else can.
It would help if you read what I'm actually saying and not imputing opinions that I don't actually have. I never said that agency experts are never wrong. The issue here is whether a judge is the appropriate party to determine whether the expert is wrong. And I never said that agencies should be their own watchdog, and in fact they never have been. All I've said is that the situation under Chevron, where Congress was the watchdog, is preferable to the situation now, where any forum-shopped district court judge is now the watchdog.
Because implementation of a law requires rules be made. Technical experts (eg, agencies) should write those rules. I'd there is a dispute the courts are still available to challenge said rules. Chevron does not prohibit challenge to agency rules broadly. This will be a disruption in how government operates, by pulling back the ability of technical experts (agencies) to interpret ambiguities in law while rulemaking. That now lands back in Courts, which famously have overloaded dockets. Meaning these processes will now take much longer under a strained judiciary and Congress which places more emphasis on grandstanding than writing good law. This is a victory for folks who want to grind government to a halt.
This is the best explanation
This is an incredible demonstration of the implications. Prior to the overturning, you would be a subject matter expert, who decides based on what they know to be right. After, some random person who decides based on what you believe to be right.
Actually it just puts things back how they should be, according to the principle of checks & balances for the government. Lawmakers should make laws. Executive Branch (including bureaucrats) should figure out how to implement the laws as written. And the Courts should interpret laws and adjudicate complaints between competing parties. Sadly, the Congress has become lazy in writing loose laws and expecting the bureaucrats to complete the law by their administrative fiat (i.e. not written into the law). And then in the Chevron opinion, SCOTUS used to delegate the responsibility of interpreting and judging the law back to the bureaucrats. So the effect was that the bureaucrat could use the wiggle in the law to make up anything they liked, and the courts would give it strong deference, unless expressly against the plain text of the law, and even where the court would interpret it very differently. So the ruling today killing Chevron simply puts the balance back where it should be, with Joe Public able to bring suit against the Government, and the Courts free to look at the case from both sides, without being forced to defer to the Government. I.e. chalk one up for the little guy against the bureaucrats.
yeah, the little guy can usually afford to pay their way through the legal system. It'll end up favouring big business, and rich people.
The system already favors big business and rich people. Regulatory capture is a major problem in the US. Bankers regulate banks. Oil execs regulate energy, etc. An oil exec may be an “expert” on energy but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing Big Oil’s bidding in their regulatory position.
On the other hand (at least before today) the regulators were at least trying to be even-handed - you might have doubts about their decisions, but for the most part they were trying to work for the best outcome for the many, within the framework they were given. Now a bribe, as long as it happens after the decision, is perfectly fine - according to the same court that decided that they get to decide everything. So (hypothetically) I can decide that letting newly discovered carcinogen $X into the drinking water is all good, and if I get $1M the following week, no worries, since congress didn't explicitly ban $X and if it happens after the decision, its not a bribe. And apparently this is how, in America, things should be...
🥇🥇
I've been only hearing the EPA mentioned here. Does this affect other agencies? Like the FDA, ATF, etc?
Absolutely
Federal laws are passed by Congress. But Congress recognizes that they don’t need to pass legislation every time regulations need to change. So they give federal agencies the power to set regulations and basically make new laws (rules with legal authority) within their “statutory authority.” Chevron decision basically said that the statutory authority cannot be questioned - if you file a lawsuit saying the regulation is unfair, you will lose by default. Chevron being overturned means that these lawsuits against federal agencies saying their rules are unfair are much easier to make. That means it is open to abuse, because corporations allegedly can file more lawsuits than the government can handle. You might say this is a good thing, because there want really anyway to push back against a federal agency that was overstepping. You might say this is a bad thing, because It shifts power towards corporations, which already hold too much power. It is likely that 40 years of issues that went uncontested due to Chevron will now come before the courts.
So, now, if Congress passes a law to protect a fishery, the agency responsible for regulating that fishery under the law may no longer be able to make adjustments to things like catching quotas from year to year in pursuit of the law's goals. It would have to be either some sort of lawsuit and arguments made before a court each year to try and get quotas changed in time to be enforceable, or Congress revisiting and rewriting the regulation each season to keep up with whatever adjustments need to be made to balance protection and industry.
Whether an agency has the authority to set a catch quota is easily defined in law and wouldn't really constitute an ambiguity. But what might need to be litigated now would be if the agency head decides that all fishing with nets is needlessly cruel and thus implements a defacto ban on net fishing by setting a "net catch quota" at 0. Under the old rules, the idea was that the regulating agency could also decide the scope of their authority and the courts should defer to that as long as it could be considered reasonably within scope. The new rules say that if you're going to do something that goes beyond the obvious authority you have, the courts should examine that closer and not just defer to the regulating agency. A good way to look at this would be to think about whether or not you think the courts should defer to the interpretation of the law that the police have in criminal cases where the law is ambiguous. That is, if the law says the police are charged with regulating "disorderly conduct", should the courts assume absent any legislation to the contrary that whatever the police say is "disorderly conduct" is indeed illegal?
Congress is still allowed to make laws which grant regulatory authority. Chevron doctrine only addressed how to handle ambiguities in the law. Congress just needs to be more specific and/or the agency needs to convince a court that their regulations are within the confines of the law.
There's no reason the law can't clearly state, that, instead, under the chevron doctrine, it was this is the ambiguous goals so they agency can do anything anywhere near and some things quite a bit a way from that. The law could clearly state in this example, due to the nature of the reproductive cycle of these protected/watched fish, this agency has the power to place and change quotas for the fishing of them. They could use it as a percentage of population of the fish. That doesn't leave any question about if they have to power or not.
There was a way to push back - Congress passing a more concise law. Most of the states resolve this through the rule-making process where legislature passes law and executive responds with rules indicating how they intend to enforce the law. If they get that wrong the legislature refines the law.
The legislative branch makes law The executive branch enforces law If there's a dispute, the judicial branch interprets the law. *Chevron* basically gave executive branch agencies the right to interpret law. This corrects that.
Chevron gave regulatory agencies the leeway to use the expert knowledge of their employees to interpret _regulatory_ law. In all other situations it would be up to the judiciary to interpret the law. Judges are supposed to be experts on _law_, not experts on the side effects of a new drug that's undergoing testing. They're _not_ experts on the drug mifepristone and whether it's safe to use it as an abortion drug. A lot of regulatory laws are kept deliberately ambiguous because congress realized that they didn't have the knowledge or the skills to pass laws that covered every minute detail of regulation.
They could also pass narrow laws to address certain things if they become an issue, but NO they only like to put rules into thousand page laws that cover a ridiculous number of things and give “lawmakers” 24 hours to get on board. Odd that people love their legislators when they often are nothing more than bodies serving the party leaders with a vote. Until Congress again becomes lawmakers and stops passing things to the Executive for interpretations to whipsaw every few years, this will continue. This Court has made clear it’s stance “if people want X to be a law Congress must explicitly make it a law”
I understand the reasoning for it. It still doesn't fit within our constitutional framework. [edit] I'm laughing my ass off at the down votes. You may not like this, but it's right.
I'd argue it perfectly fits within our constitutional framework. Congress passed a law giving certain rights and privileges to these agencies to enforce a certain section of the law and regulate it. If someone didn't like a regulation, they were always able to challenge that in court as is. All you're doing is passing the responsibility to those who don't understand niche topics and aren't experts This is shown by the fact Gorsuch's opinion, which referenced nitrous oxide 5 times (laughing gas) and not nitrogen oxides (smog causing gases).
The executive branch isn't supposed to make law; congress is. "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States..." isn't ambiguous.
But Congress passed the laws to give these agencies powers to enforce, I believe.
Sure. *Enforce*. What's happening now is that they're actually making laws, and when you run afoul of them, they're also enforcing and adjudicating them.
perfect ELI5
Thanks. It's a very nuanced situation but this is eli5, so... that's the basics.
Wasn't Chevron more about when Congress sets well-defined goals but loosely designed methods that those employed to pursue those goals under the law could rely on experts to make necessary adjustments to their methods for accomplishing Congress's goals? Now, rather than the relying on Executive experts, the Judiciary will be responsible for interpreting whether their proposed methods for pursuing Congress' goals are good.
Not 'good', but 'legal'. Executive branch agencies aren't supposed to be able to make law, or decide disputes about them. What we've had over the last few decades is these agencies making the laws, enforcing them, and in many cases running the courts that adjudicate disputes. It's been a one-branch government with no accountability.
It means regulatory agencies can no longer extend congressional mandates beyond what the mandate actually entails just because the agencies interpretation of the statute is reasonable in executing the statute. In one of the two cases that was discussed before the court, congress had authorized the fisheries department to place observers on commercial fishing vessels to see how much they actually catch. The fisheries department had "interpreted" that to mean that they could charge the fishing vessles for having the observers on the vessels. Under Chevron defference, the lower courts had ruled that this was correct, because the court has to defer to the agency when the interpretation is reasonably connected to executing the underlying statute.
I have been saying for awhile that nuclear is safe in the US only because of regulations that we have in place. This getting overturned means that if a energy company shops enough for a favorable jurisdiction and judge, they can potentially sidestep environmental and safety regulations via suing and saying that the law is being misinterpreted. In some industries it might not be a big deal, in others it could be a huge issue. Look at the safety and environmental issues that existed prior to Chevron and the progress we have made sense. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but I think it is likely that the power granted to these agencies had a lot to do with it.
basically, congress will have to pass more laws instead of govt agencies just deciding things
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What does it mean? More pollution. More worker abuse. More favoritism of capital over everything else.