A bunch of people on Lemmy were defending this decision after it came out, suggesting that the courts were the best place to litigate things like corporations causing massive environmental damage rather than the EPA doing it because you couldn’t trust the EPA under a conservative administration to act fairly.
And then maybe a week later, SCOTUS said presidents could commit crimes if it was part of an official act.
I stopped seeing defenses of SCOTS’ decision on Loper Bright after that.
I’d never heard of the Loper Bright case. This looks as bad as Citizens United.
The high court rejected a doctrine granting deference to regulatory agencies in interpreting laws when Congress hasn’t clearly defined the scope of the agencies’ power.
That doctrine, known as Chevron deference, was named after the 1984 Supreme Court case in which it emerged, and it offered an answer to a recurring question: What happens when Congress passes a law granting power to a federal agency but fails to precisely define the boundaries of that power?
In such situations, the doctrine of Chevron deference instructed federal judges to rely on the interpretations made by federal agencies, as long as those interpretations were reasonable, since agencies typically have greater expertise in their subject areas than judges.
Dissenting, Justice Elena Kagan noted that federal courts had cited Chevron deference 18,000 times, making it “part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds — to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.” She warned of “large-scale disruption.”
Not saying the Chevron deference should have been rejected out of hand, but if it has been cited as much as Kagan says it sounds like Congress needs to work with these agencies to write better laws. Of course some deference will always be needed. The SCOTUS decision was idealism at its worst. They ignore that these agencies act as extensions of Congress. Unfortunately the “originalists” on the court have a childish adherence to their strict interpretation BS.
Go read the building code and then tell me you’d rather have it written by politicians instead of engineers and architects.
You don’t want congress writing exacting laws in a lot of regulatory situations. Think if congress right now was setting interest rates. It wouldn’t get done until long after the economy had imploded. Even if they were listening to the same economists, political problems would create a disaster. The same is true in most cases concerning the EPA and other regulatory agencies. By the time congress would be able to respond to a situation, everyone would have died of whatever the problem was.
Uh, no
