this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
4 points (100.0% liked)
Law
365 readers
1 users here now
Discussion about legal topics, centered around United States
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Chevron deference means that as long as the interpretation of a statute taken by a federal agency is reasonable, the court will not overrule it. Undermining that means shifting power to interpret those statutes from the agencies to the courts: https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/2/23706535/supreme-court-chevron-deference-loper-bright-raimondo
That's not correct. Undermining Chevron means stripping power from agencies. The Courts will not than supplant their own interpretations or make new rules.
They will punt to Congress, where nothing will get done. The Government is too big and serves too many people to have Congress decide every single issue. The issues are far too complex. Chevron deference exists because agencies are specialized and generally know more about the statutes they are charged with interpreting than anyone else, especially Congress.
You are not thinking through this clearly. The court will indeed overrule the agency interpretation and substitute their own interpretation, that's the whole thing. Congress could in theory overrule the court's interpretation by passing a new law, but as you say nothing tends to get done in congress. So in practice getting rid of Chevron deference is a huge transfer of power from the executive branch to the judicial branch.
The only opinion this Court will give post-Chevron is the opinion that a given regulation is not a reasonable agency interpretation of the enabling statute. They will not substitute the agency's rule with their own, bench-made regulatoions, as doing so would preserve the reach of agencies.
Rather, the Court will just strike down regulations without supplanting the stricken text with anything. This has the effect of sending the matter back to Congress to clarify the enabling act, which the billionaire class knows is purgatory for progress. This sort of jurisprudence strips an agency's reach.
What? No that is not how any of this works. There's no sense in which the court sends matters back to congress. They make a ruling that the way an agency has been interpreting a statute is incorrect, and order them to change their interpretation and thus their actions. Congress can of course pass a new statute, but almost always in these modern gridlocked times the real result is that the court's new interpretation is the new law. All that would change with Chevron being overruled is they'd intervene much more frequently based on the easier to reach standard for overrulinig an agency decision.