There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the china shop breaking precedent at random or specifically to hurt specific groups of people.
I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this court has made over and over and over again. Their legal and constitutional philosophy has been very consistent:
They believe that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets them. They believe that the Executive branch and the Judicial branch have been compensating for Congressional failure for too long and they have been very clear that they're intent on undoing that and rolling the system back to how they believe it should be.
There's an argument to be made that this theory is incorrect and/or harmful, but they've been remarkably consistent in applying it. Anyone who's been listening to them saw this coming years ago.
Unless the way elections are handled changes, such as doing anything that selects for expertise instead of partisan hackery, all this is going to do is accelerate the gridlock, corruption, and dysfunction. It just does not logically follow that putting more pressure on the legislative branch to be functional is going to work when its functionality or lack thereof is based largely on a very gerrymandered population being blasted non-stop by a completely co-opted, corrupt media. When the corruption and control is so thoroughly embedded already, the difference between "unelected official" and "party-and-special-interest-approved elected official" becomes a silly fig leaf of a difference.
Institutionally-declared experts are not exactly famous for their lack of partisan hackery, especially not in recent years.
> It just does not logically follow that putting more pressure on the legislative branch to be functional is going to work
You're talking like this is a political tactic or strategy used by the Supreme Court to achieve a specific outcome (which might "work" or "not work"), but it's not. Justices aren't meant to make such plans. They are supposed to do their job. If Congress does or doesn't do theirs, that isn't by itself the Court's problem nor something to which they should be the solution.
But it's also worth remembering that what "works" means varies a lot depending on perspective. There is plenty of stuff that is bipartisan in Congress and which they get done fairly quietly. Additionally, to the school of thought known as libertarianism, Congress not doing things is the desirable outcome and thus a gridlocked Congress is in fact the system working as designed, in the sense that it is being limited by the degree of agreement amongst voters on what it should do.
Hmm well I'm a foreigner so am not really affected by Supreme Court judgements, and I would say that this particular court seems to be doing an unusually good job of just following the law as written regardless of outcome. Certainly it seems true when compared to the supreme court equivalents in most other countries, which are largely a joke.
As an example, the Supreme Court made another judgement this week that has pissed off lots of conservatives: it dismissed a case about social media companies banning political speech about COVID at the behest of the government, on the basis of lack of standing. This was widely seen as a blow against free speech. If you read the judgement though the problem was simply that the people being censored hadn't shown clearly that it was the government doing the censoring vs the social network executives, and were relying on a sort of ambient argument that the government was leaning on the companies in ways that weren't always clear, and so there was a First Amendment violation at one-hop-removed.
The court rejected this reasoning, saying they could only rule on cases where the people doing the appeal could show they had been directly harmed by the government, so they weren't even going to consider the rest of the case. If the Supreme Court were a bunch of conservative activists they wouldn't have done that. They'd have accepted the indirect censorship argument, accepted that the case had standing and then ruled against the federal agencies. And in fact the conservatives I saw talking about it were raging against "technical" judgements that could only be the result of pro-regime bias etc etc. But the judgement seemed logically sound to me. So the idea that the current court is packed with judges abusing process to get specific ideological outcomes looks very wrong.
I never paid attention to Supreme Court rulings before a year or so ago but suddenly it seems like they're all over HN. So this is the first time I've read them. The thing that's really striking is how stupidly obvious all these cases seem to be and how weak the original legal reasoning being overturned was. You can understand the argument within a few pages of reading, usually. Like when Roe v Wade was struck down, all I knew about it was that it was related to legalizing abortion. So naturally I figured it was something to do with abortion law. When it was struck down, I learned for the first time that it actually relied on some convoluted backflips to do with privacy law that had nothing to do with abortion, moreover it seemed almost everyone in the legal profession had always known it was logically dubious and the product of an activist court, etc. It was pretty surprising that such a judgement had survived so long, honestly.
Likewise for this judgement, what they're saying is there's not only the Constitution but also a specific act of Congress which both state that when statutes are ambiguous the courts decide on the correct interpretation. In the original Chevron judgement those laws appear to have been ignored and the courts started letting the executive branch decide what ambiguous law meant. That then became just the way things are done, but the law had never actually been changed to allow that. Once again this judgement seems .... kinda obvious? It's not exactly a complex feat of legal reasoning. The laws says the courts resolve ambiguity, they weren't doing it, now they've been told to do it. End of judgement.
It's quite fascinating how many commenters just assume that if there's a decision they don't like from a court it must be due to bias and corruption. Makes me wonder what they think when there's a decision they do like.
It's part of the polarization of politics over the past few decades where the ends justify the means and the sooner the better. People have given up on understanding underlying principles, let alone believing they are necessary for good long-term outcomes. One can even argue many have given up on the long-term entirely in favour of instant gratification of their demands for societal change .
You can see that even in this very discussion where a substantial fraction of the comments are making claims that this ruling will prevent regulation entirely -- a claim entirely unsupported by the principles in question.
i am sympathetic to desire to change how elections are handled (universal suffrage is a stupid idea without universal risk/ skin in the game, we need a way to make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method) but its not happening.
i also think you are mistaking long term corruption and chaos with a normal process in big party system where every several decades the big voting blocks move around and thatparalyzes the politicians until they are sure who their voting blocks are. onve the voting blocks finishmigrating and sort out dominance per party things will go back more towards historical functioninglevels
>we need a way to make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method
another small govt ideologue that thinks the US's federal budget works like a household's
>make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method)
My idea is to apportion costs to the voter's choices (you want lobster, you pay for lobster), and/or hamstring the ability to move and immediately get access to voting in the new place's elections.
you can read in my other response but the short answer is: post a bond equal to X weeks salary to vote, bond is held for duration of those elected people's time and if they run a deficit the first hit comes off the posted bond before the country starts taking on debt. If you want to vote again next time post more money to top yourself up.
Right now almost everyone gets to vote ( basically if you are a citizen who is over 18 you get to vote in most democracies) but when you look at how the government actually functions a majority of these voters are strongly net beneficiaries of government (through direct and indirect transfers) and have almost no risk from any of their votes because the strongest argument you can make is their taxes may go up but their transfers will likely still cover it and those transfers may be in forms that are less optimal than whatever they were spending that cash on directly before it was taxed away and then transferred back. Its' a very weak claim to having any skin in the game. Even among the minority of people actually paying for all this and not getting it back as transfers, you can make an argument that a subset of those guys are also largely insulated because they are good at getting excess government subsidy for their businesses via lobbying. Overall, there's a very tiny group of people who are experiencing actual costs from the decisions made by voters, which is stupid. Most of the people making the decisions need to have some real exposure to their decisions. I would personally do it by requiring people put up 2 weeks salary as a bond that pays some nominal interest but is stuck for at least the period that that election is valid for and if the people elected run deficits then the deficit is paid for out of the posted salary first prorated so that everyone experiences the same percentage of the pain and has to post the same percentage again at the next election if they want to vote there. You could also solve this by limiting voting to the people actually paying but that's a really bad idea for abuse reasons. Better to keep the voter rolls as broad as possible and just ensure people get a taste of the results of their choices as above (or through some other method, I'm open to ideas).
>Its' a very weak claim to having any skin in the game.
The government is the only entity that can legally take away my liberties, possessions, and life. By falling under its rule, all residents literally have their skins in the game.
Your starting point of money transfers could be read as an argument for better economic equality. If, for a person with a socially necessary and full-time job, taking more in taxes than they receive in benefits will financially ruin them, I won't blame the worker.
>The government is the only entity that can legally take away my liberties, possessions, and life. By falling under its rule, all residents literally have their skins in the game.
No, what that is is a recipe for tyranny of the majority (of weak performers) over the high performers by way of voting for policies that transfer wealth from the guys that got the job done to the guys that didn't. You are conflating the need for a strong constitution limiting government power with the idea that because maybe it's possible for the government to do some bad things to you you should get the right to tell the government to take from others and give to you.
Your second paragraph is just wrong. Money transfers are abusing one group for the benefit of a different group. It's weaponization of the very thing you incorrectly claimed as a reason you should get a vote in your first paragraph. The argument for transfers would be about network effects from the transfer being so great to the payer that they are better off (think providing healthcare has a network effect of healthier workers and customers making the paying business owner better off through increased sales/lower sick costs and other things of this variety) and the argument would be that if they weren't trying to freeload they would do the transfer anyway because it is in their interest. Your second sentence of your wrong second paragraph is wrong in the sense of being nonsensical. if you want to clarify what you mean I can then tell you why it's wrong from a logic perspective (or maybe I will agree with you, I can't tell).
Maybe eliminate secret ballots to do an "if you vote for it/him, you pay for its/his costs" sort of system?
Or keep ballots secret and apportion taxes to districts or counties which vote for increased costs, and have it be sticky on move for 5-10 years. Also prevent new-comers from voting in local elections for a period of up to 5-10 years (while retaining the vote in the previous jurisdiction). All these things add costs to locust electorate and will slow down the californication of the south and midwest as californians continue to flee in droves. It's already causing political havoc in various locales.
Do not vote for garbage politics thus destroying your home, then move to a nice place with opposite politics just to vote your garbage again. You act like chauvinist locust when you do that, moving into new political ecosystems to destroy them into your 'ideal' vision.
If you move from blue to red state because your blue state went to hell, wait 5 or more years to register to vote. I only wish this was law so places like AZ can stay nice with lower crime, castle doctrine, and presumptive consealed carry.
Now to batton down my hatches, I sense a downvote typhoon in the air...
Secret ballot is important to avoid direct reprisal for voting the way you think is correct in the face of social pressure (the classic example is your union or your employer tells you to vote for someone you think is terrible. Without secret ballot you risk losing your livelihood for doing what you think is right) Thus you can only make sure the entire voting group has clear skin in the game and repurcussions from their group action.
forcing tax distribution is a bad idea too because there's lots of stuff it is in my interest to subsidize as a high tax payer in jurisdictions in which I don't vote (the most obvious examples being services around my factories in other states or for my customer base in other states, but there are many many other examples). I also need services in other places that are communal (i.e. I don't need a navy in nebraska but nebraskans sure benefit from the navy protecting the coasts). If you are going to do something like that it's better to clearly define government tasks and then keep levels of government out of tasks that they aren't assigned via a strong constitution.
You don't want to stop people from voting (same deal as why you want people in smaller, efficient companies making up the majority of the economy vs government and other forms of oligopoly) You just want them to experience pain from their bad choices so they are unlikely to do it again or have to really suffer to keep making bad choices so that eventually enough of them stop out that the good choice people shine through. I'm also not willing to claim their politics are garbage enough to want to stop them from voting (even though it looks like garbage to me) because I know I am not smart enough to account for all variables and accounting for all variables, at least enough to have something started to grow rapidly rather than having to start from scratch, is what all this individual freedom is great at. If I was smart enough to account for all variables we would be better government by a dictatorship of me and historically that has never turned out better than democracy on any timeline stretching past a couple rulers (this is also why we should be more agressively breaking up these large oligopolies we have let form since Rhenquist changed the supreme court position in the 70's. They aren't smart enough to have all that power either.
On the other hand, enabling the judicial and executive branch to overcompensate for this disfunction also seems problematic - particularly as the former groups aren’t elected (except for the President, of course).
I think everyone agrees congress being dysfunctional is problematic. The question is if it’s better for the other other branches to pick up the slack or if we should just let the government do nothing
> They believe that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets them. They believe that the Executive branch and the Judicial branch have been compensating for Congressional failure for too long and they have been very clear that they're intent on undoing that and rolling the system back to how they believe it should be.
If Congress wants to delegate authority for micro-managing things to agencies, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
> Kagan cited as one example a hypothetical bill to regulate artificial intelligence. Congress, she said, “knows there are going to be gaps because Congress can hardly see a week in the future.” So it would want people “who actually know about AI and are accountable to the political process to make decisions” about artificial intelligence. Courts, she emphasized, “don’t even know what the questions are about AI,” much less the answers.
If Congress doesn't like where an Executive agency is headed they can further change the Act governing it to clarify things. The guardrails can be set that way, and with-in them agencies—generally subject matter experts—can write and refine regulations as they are needed.
The Executive agencies and departments are created by Congress. US regulatory agencies have authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
The Judiciary seems to be limiting the Legislative here. Is there anything in the US Constitution that says Congress cannot delegate?
Congress can still delegate the known unknowns. They can say "because we are not experts in this subject, we delegate to agency X the power to decide whether this should be done in X or Y way"
What they cannot do anymore is delegate unknown unknowns. They cannot leave X and Y unspecified, the executive agencies cannot do things in Z way that Congress didn't enumerate, or α and β way that Congress didn't even conceive.
>If Congress wants to delegate authority for micro-managing things to agencies, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
Because the Constitution defined the Legislative branch as the entry point for new laws. Not the Executive. Period. The Legislative branch, with the Power of the Purse, is more than capable of establishing the requisite in-house research apparata to allow the Branch to become quickly read up and fluent on anything. That was the purpose of the Library of Congress, and the Office of Technology Assessment. OTA, in particular, was dismantled by Congress because "why should we have this when all the lobbyists are so well informed anyway". I.e. an act of a group of politicians that should damn well know better than to blindly believe everything they are told/ignore everything they are specifically not told by special interests without corroborating reality first through the exercise of legislative subpoenas.
Congress put it's eyes out in a desperate bid to make it that much easier to be held unaccountable for doing their jobs, necessitating delegation to the Executive, which was far easier to manage dealing with.
>The Executive agencies and departments are created by Congress. US regulatory agencies have authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
Yep. Those Agencies, however, should not be making corpuses of law (Administrative law; but I'll be charitable for argument sake, and grant that Administrative law is a necessary evil).
Notwithstanding the above, the Judiciary damn well shouldn't be ignoring grievance redressing relevant to any Administrative law. The Executive cannot be allowed to be all rolled up in one lawmaker, enforcer, and interpreter of last resort. It completely undermines the principle of seperation of powers.
Does that make life harder? Hell yes. Governing ain't supposed to be easy. It's high demand, high overhead, and wide blast radius at the Federal level. The fact the Legislature has gotten so bad at legislating should be a point of shame on us all.
> Because the Constitution defined the Legislative branch as the entry point for new laws.
And (some) delegation has been found to be Constitutional for (at least) a century:
> Since 1935, the Court has not struck down a delegation to an administrative agency.15 Rather, the Court has approved, without deviation, Congress's ability to delegate power under broad standards.16 The Court has upheld, for example, delegations to administrative agencies to determine excessive profits during wartime,17 to determine unfair and inequitable distribution of voting power among securities holders,18 to fix fair and equitable commodities prices,19 to determine just and reasonable rates,20 and to regulate broadcast licensing as the public interest, convenience, or necessity require.21
> When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency's policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do. The responsibilities for assessing the wisdom of such policy choices and resolving the struggle between competing views of the public interest are not judicial ones: "Our Constitution vests such responsibilities in the political branches."
> more than capable of establishing the requisite in-house research apparata to allow the Branch to become quickly read up and fluent on anything.
Not only can they not “become fluent in anything,” it shifts more power to lobbyists and industry where expertise exists that can draft the language they want with the loopholes they want. The scale of federal governance is literally impossible without the looseness of intent interpretation that can be challenged and validated by the court.
You may as well say we can replace the regulatory bureaucracies with expert systems, because we should be able to predict every possible outcome beforehand and just make a giant if/then out of it.
>Not only can they not “become fluent in anything,” it shifts more power to lobbyists and industry where expertise exists that can draft the language they want with the loopholes they want.
The Office of Technology Assessment was dismantled specifically because it was making it too hard for lobbyists to transparently pull the wool over lawmaker's eyes. Suddenly there was paper trail that the Legislature *knew, or should have known, that lobbyists were feeding Congress a line. OTA's entire job was to issue legislative subpoena's to collect information relative to legislative business.
Congress can literally make itself the single most pre-eminent employer of research staff on the planet, overnight. Do not sit here, and tell me with a straight face, that that is infeasible. The issue is will to govern, and reluctance by moneyed interests to start being questioned back by motivated, competent answer seekers in D.C. they can't legally withhold info from without committing the equivalent of a felony.
>The scale of federal governance is literally impossible without the looseness of intent interpretation that can be challenged and validated by the court.
That (challenging in Court) couldn't happen with Chevron deference in practice. Now it can. Good riddance.
Federal governance is far from impossible to do; and I'd like to know your definition of Federal governance. If it's "I want to pass a controversial law once to get it to stick in all jurisdictions, damn the consequences"; then not only do your complaints fall on unsympathetic ears, but I'd say that's the system working as designed, and Chevron was a step to breaking it worse.
If on the other hand, Federal Governance is "the judicious elevation to the highest level of government/enforcement only those tasks that need to be there irrespective of any individual subjurisdictions, all subject to the constraints of who does what aspect of the job as set forth in the Constitution of the United States"; then we're cool. I feel ya'. Them's the breaks though. And I say that as an ex-civil servant.
Government work is hard, thankless, frustrating, and the most dangerous thing to get fast and loose with.
> The Office of Technology Assessment was dismantled specifically because it was making it too hard for lobbyists to transparently pull the wool over lawmaker's eyes. Suddenly there was paper trail that the Legislature *knew, or should have known, that lobbyists were feeding Congress a line. OTA's entire job was to issue legislative subpoena's to collect information relative to legislative business.
> Congress can literally make itself the single most pre-eminent employer of research staff on the planet, overnight. Do not sit here, and tell me with a straight face, that that is infeasible. The issue is will to govern, and reluctance by moneyed interests to start being questioned back by motivated, competent answer seekers in D.C. they can't legally withhold info from without committing the equivalent of a felony.
And this ruling is going to change this how exactly? It isn't. It is merely going to increase the gap between what is going on in the real world and what is effectively regulated. This is a shift in power from the unelected bureaucracy to the unelected judicial. I'll take the bureaucrats.
> Federal governance is far from impossible to do; and I'd like to know your definition of Federal governance. If it's "I want to pass a controversial law once to get it to stick in all jurisdictions, damn the consequences"; then not only do your complaints fall on unsympathetic ears, but I'd say that's the system working as designed, and Chevron was a step to breaking it worse.
Federal governance includes the need to manage, iterate, and execute on regulation in a world that is far too quickly changing and far too complex for 535 people. There are more decision makers than that in a large tech company.
Congress can delegate authority to the agencies. This ruling just says that they have to explicitly do so instead of chevrons ruling that agencies may interpret ambiguous statutes however they like.
Also, if the commenters here READ the full decision, the court explains the history and its reasoning better than any of us can do here.
That's a common feature of Supreme Court decisions, and I find many Supreme Court decisions to be very interesting reading, including those from past decades.
If you are stating that Heller is specious and a fig leaf, you are arguing from a position of bad faith. You may disagree with the constitutional basis for the decision and wish the second amendment to be abolished, but the decision was well stated and solid.
> You may disagree with the constitutional basis for the decision and wish the second amendment to be abolished, but the decision was well stated and solid.
The decision, as written by the late Scalia, to create an individual right bears no resemblance to any historical or legal precedent. Acting as amateur linguist and etymologist, it is ironic that Scalia, a so-called Originalist, also ignores the original meaning of the terms in the amendment.
This is independent of whether 2A is currently useful, or—even more importantly—whether it was even a good/effective idea in the first place.
> I would point people to the decision itself. This throw0101b is clearly acting in bad faith to anyone happening to read this.
People should read the decision. People should also read the dissent. They should also read commentary on the decision. They should also read the legal and cultural history of 2A.
There's no bad faith in thinking Scalia et al got it wrong.
I understand that one reason for the continuing of Chevron deference is that Congress has been writing laws for the past 4 decades assuming that the agencies can iron out the ambiguities.
I wonder if going forward congress can just try to have those agencies iron out the ambiguities before passing the law? Or is the idea that its impossible to anticipate all possible edge cases and congress wants to let the agency iron out future issue?
> Congress has been writing laws for the past 4 decades assuming that the agencies can iron out the ambiguities
My understanding is that the big problem is that this expectation is implicit.
Congress isn't granting agencies the authority to make determinations as to what falls into a category, for instance. Instead, they're creating a category without further elaboration.
Compare that to 18 USC 921(a)(4)(C), which says in part:
The term “destructive device” shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon; any device, although originally designed for use as a weapon, which is redesigned for use as a signaling, pyrotechnic, line throwing, safety, or similar device; surplus ordnance sold, loaned, or given by the Secretary of the Army pursuant to the provisions of section 7684(2), 7685, or 7686 of title 10; or any other device which the Attorney General finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, is an antique, or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting, recreational or cultural purposes.
This explicitly established a process through which the Attorney General may exclude weapons from the "destructive device" category at their discretion.
My understanding is that this would not be impacted by overturning Chevron, as the process was established by Congress explicitly. Hypothetically, if that provision did not exist and the AG unilaterally decided that a weapon that was otherwise included in the category should not be, then that would be an example of executive rulemaking within the bounds of Chevron.
> Or is the idea that its impossible to anticipate all possible edge cases and congress wants to let the agency iron out future issue?
This Plus, it's often a case of Congress kicking the can down the road: Enough votes in Congress might agree that something needs to be done, but they can't come up with agreement on the details — often because of conflicting special-interest (read: donor) lobbying about those details. So the legislators say, in effect, "OK, let's get 'a bill' passed [a minimum viable product, if you will] and let the agencies deal with it. Then later, if a major problem comes up with a particular agency ruling, we can revisit the issue then."
Yes but people who have been listening have also been dreading this coming for years. The fact that they're consistently knocking over shelves doesn't make it better.
We've known that Roe was on the chopping block, but it doesn't make it good law even if it's consistent with the conservative justices' goals.
Like I said, there are legitimate arguments to be made against this change, but a lot of people are quick to assume that the Court is out to get them.
The cases that people would approve of if they heard about them get ignored by social media, instead focusing exclusively on the cases that undo some rights that had been established by judicial or executive precedent. So we end up in a place where a lot of commenters are under the false impression that the Court just hates ___ people, rather than seeing the whole picture of the court systematically rolling back judicial activist rulings and executive rule makings.
I do not understand how you can not see this is an activist court. They have by fiat invented new judicial principles out of thin air: "history and tradition" and "major questions doctrine" come to mind. And they apply these arbitrary principles in a heavy handed, inconsistent and simultaneously predictable way while sanctimoniously acting as though we can't see what they are doing.
The court seems intent on allowing judge shopping conservatives to gut any even mildly inconvenient law.
Going back to a "balance" where judges interpret law and no one else creates massive ambiguity across courts & greatly degrades any ability to govern. That seems to be the fantasy world that some parts of America desire. And that this court is working towards, hard as it can.
It interprets that only the court gets to allow or deny
>Yes but people who have been listening have also been dreading this coming for years.
Why are they dreading this? I find it strange how so many people are upset that the Supreme Court is forcing Congress to do its job, which is pass laws.
But the effect of this ruling will mean that Congress will have to pass an order of magnitude more laws; and there is only so much time for debates (which are required in order to pass laws). Or, executive bodies won't be able to do what is required to keep country wide productivity up.
This is the equivalent of requiring a stand up meeting for every commit to a repo; it's plainly obvious that over time it will kill USA's productivity. This is judicial drag on the economy.
It's worth noting that other comparable countries don't delegate law-making power to the executive in the same way the US does. For example in the UK only Parliament may make laws, the civil service can draft it but that's the limit (post-EU-exit that is, the EU is something else).
There is a concept called a statutory instrument in which the process is optimized by allowing changes to be made to law either by "laying them before" Parliament, in which case only approval or rejection is possible, not amendment. Annulling new regulations in this manner is extremely rare however. Or in some cases it's allowed for the responsible Minister or committee of MPs to make the changes directly, which in practice means they sign off on changes proposed by the civil service. This is usually only the case for very minor changes like updating thresholds, shutting down roads for construction work etc.
Despite the inability of the civil service to directly change the law, the UK is not suffering from a deficit of regulations. So there's no reason in principle it should harm productivity, unless you mean, productivity of the government itself.
As an FYI: Parliamentary governments routinely delegate regulation-making power to the particular Ministries, in exactly the same way as the USA Congress delegates it to executive agencies.
Yes I mentioned SIs already. The powers are technically delegated to a minister not an agency, however, who is (almost always) an elected member of parliament.
It seems like an important distinction that unlike the US their government intentionally collapses if the legislature no longer supports the executive. Given two separate legislatures, the filibuster, the presidential veto , fixed terms, etc. it might just make sense for the US government to work a little differently.
That's not true, negative procedure SIs do not need to be approved. They can only be rejected. Most SIs are negatives, not the positives that you described.
You answered your own question there. Congress should do its job, but as a matter of fact it is not doing its job and it is not going to do its job anytime soon.
The Court might be technically, legally, philosophically correct in removing the inelegant hacks that the previous courts set up to route around the fact that Congress does not do its job. But in the meantime, Congress is still not doing its job.
I'm talking about the "people who have been listening to the court and dreading this". Who are these listeners who remain undefined? Are they congressmembers? Are they pundits?
The obvious example is pro-choice people who wish that Congress would pass a law that favors their position, and have been forced to rely on weird Supreme Court rulings by activist judges instead.
You can argue that the pro-choice people should just accept that Congress does not decide in their favor, that this is a democracy and in a democracy sometimes you lose. But it's not like Congress has decided in favor of their opponents either. They just decide nothing. If Congress actually decided one way or the other then at least people would know where they stand and could stop feeling anxious about it.
Congress is broken and structurally incapable of passing laws under this level of political polarization because there are too many veto points (bicameral legislature, the filibuster, the presidential veto) for any law to get passed even if it's supported by the majority of legislators and the majority of voters.
That's a nice catch 22 they've got there. Congress has been passing laws for decades under the assumption that the Chevron case is settled precedent. Now they're getting rid of it because... Congress needed to instead pass laws completely ignoring the courts ruling?
> Why are they dreading this? I find it strange how so many people are upset that the Supreme Court is forcing Congress to do its job, which is pass laws.
Congress is extremely dysfunctional and won’t be able to keep up. Corporations are going to exploit the lag in rule making by fucking over individuals like you and me. That’s why I’m concerned.
Vesting unreviewable legislative authority in unelected bureaucrats specifically chosen because of their long and close ties to the industries they are meant to regulate is anathema to every tenet of democracy. Good riddance.
Removing Chevron deference moves authority from the administrative agencies to the courts, who are not only also unelected bureaucrats, they are more insulated from democratic forces since they have lifetime appointments. Agency heads are political appointments and change with every president.
I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for mentioning downvotes, but it's funny to me that when this comment was on the submission for the actual supreme court ruling it ended up pinned to the top with 20+ upvotes, but since the merge with the Axios article it's been steadily ticking down, having lost 18 points in less than an hour.
I don't know if it's brigading or if it says something about the difference between readers of Axios articles and readers of full supreme court rulings.
I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this court has made over and over and over again. Their legal and constitutional philosophy has been very consistent:
They believe that Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them, and the Judicial branch interprets them. They believe that the Executive branch and the Judicial branch have been compensating for Congressional failure for too long and they have been very clear that they're intent on undoing that and rolling the system back to how they believe it should be.
There's an argument to be made that this theory is incorrect and/or harmful, but they've been remarkably consistent in applying it. Anyone who's been listening to them saw this coming years ago.