WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday upended a 40-year-old decision that made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections, delivering a far-reaching and potentially lucrative victory to business interests.
The court’s six conservative justices overturned the 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron, long a target of conservatives. The liberal justices were in dissent.
Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in challenges that could be spawned by the high court’s ruling. The Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer had warned such a move would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.”
The heart of the Chevron decision says federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details when laws aren’t crystal clear. Opponents of the decision argued that it gave power that should be wielded by judges to experts who work for the governmient.
i’ve never been more convinced at how utterly cooked we are as a country than i have been in the last 24 hours
the Chevron decision will affect every single person in America – and to some extent in the entire world. 70 Supreme Court rulings and 17,000 lower court rulings relied on Chevron. this is massive and cannot be overstated. we are in deep shit.
In the same way I constantly push back against legalism, in practice a number of institutions will simply defacto ignore the ruling and because everyone wants them to do their jobs no one will push back. So it won’t be quite as big a blow to state capacity as it might seem.
But that is just on the margins, overall this is a truly terrible decision, maybe the worst decision of this court so far (yes, worse than Dobbs) depending on how it plays out (there are more limited interpretations that may prevail in the million court cases this will generate). The US continues to be a government at war with itself.
This is the consequence of overturning Chevron I’m more worried about, rather than the partisan one. It’s possible this opens the door to more litigation over every policy decision, less certainty, and more veto points in a system that already has too many.
Now, there are also countervailing effects. One issue with Chevron is that agencies would change their interpretations and courts would defer to each subsequent interpretation, and so referring matters to courts which respect stare decisis might actually increase certainty.
But still, the risk of increased policy paralysis is significant.
admittedly I only know Chevron deference from civil rights litigation, but it is absolutely rotten. it is an excuse to allow arbitrariness on the part of often unelected bureaucrats to make law as they see fit when they see fit, and for the courts to lazily take the side of the powerful when they are fucking with everyone else.
this has got to be up there among the most rotten laws the supreme court has made that are still being followed. if all you tell is that we’re getting rid of Chevron and the government once again has to follow laws and make actual cases in court (at least some of the time) that sounds great to me
This causation is backwards though - Congress has never in any way been limited in its ability to make detailed laws. It absolutely could (and sometimes does) pass say an environmental regulation noting precise quantities of lithium runoff, inspection procedures, and processes for noncompliance determination. It just does not normally do that because it is incapable of doing that, it simply cannot, for the breadth of domains being regulated. It needs bureaucracy to function because reality requires that. Elected bureaucrats suck, they are incompetent, it is only through the balance of power between them and real workers that anything can function (and the US in the main has the most “elected” bureaucrats of any major country, huge problem).
If maximally applied (it won’t be) this would not be an answer to “the government following laws”. It is preventing law from existing at all, and shoving the reality of governance into deeper levels of the shadows because reality will continue to make its demands.
ALT