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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> Moreover it seems like people don't consider the negative effects if courts decided cases in the other direction (e.g. how federal agencies could abuse their authority if Chevron had been upheld).

We don't need to hypothesize, Chevron was the law of the land for most of our lifetimes until the self-appointed Supreme Court super-legislature intervened. Arguably Chevron itself was the courts recognizing established legislative function with federal agencies that had existed for decades prior. We can see exactly how federal agencies would or would not abuse their authority, and congress really didn't have a problem with the situation as evidenced by the the absence of legislation to change the arrangement.

The legislative failure is really that congress hasn't immediately drafted new legislation to reverse this brazen power grab, discipline the rogue justices, and reform the Supreme Court back into its place as an apolitical branch.

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> We can see exactly how federal agencies would or would not abuse their authority

I would argue that federal agencies have absolutely spent those decades abusing their authority.

It must be a relief that instead of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats interpreting highly technical implementations of vague statutes, we'll now have unelected, unaccountable judges doing it.

It is, for the same reasons that it's a relief that the "unelected, unaccountable judges" interpret highly technical implementations of vague criminal statutes instead of the police. Because the police by their nature are biases towards the interpretations that make their jobs easier and give them the powers they want regardless of if they actually have it.

> it's a relief that the "unelected, unaccountable judges" interpret highly technical implementations

In the same judgment where the Supreme Court gave themselves total power to interpret technical implementations of the law, they confused nitrogen oxides with laughing gas.

I wish I shared your faith in the ability of narrowly specialized lawyers to work outside their core competency.

I have very little faith in the ability of narrowly specialized lawyers to work outside their core competency. The courts get things wrong all the time. I also have little faith in the ability of narrowly specialized administrators outside their own core competency (that being administration), or for that matter, administrators in a revolving door of regulatory capture.

My faith is in the same thing all of open source places their faith in, enough eyeballs. Congress makes a law, administrators enforce said law, citizens challenge said enforcement, courts rule on the state of the law, congress makes a law. And as we iterate over this process, the bugs are ironed out, the stakeholders have input and we work ever more towards a "more perfect" ideal.

> Congress makes a law, administrators enforce said law, citizens challenge said enforcement, courts rule on the state of the law, congress makes a law.

This is a wholesome, well intentioned idea that I support.

The problem is that for most of our lifetimes congress has been operating under a model, specified by the Supreme Court, that regulators would make a reasonable interpretation of the laws that congress wrote. Think of it as the city council saying "The parks service shall keep the parks clean and safe." Not splitting hairs about every possible threat to safety, or defining exactly what clean means. Like it or not, legislators can't and don't want to exhaustively consider every possibility, and they can't react in a timely fashion to novel problems.

The courts suddenly turning this arrangement on its head and seizing the reins is not something that voters or legislators ever envisioned. It's exactly the kind of disruptive, chaotic move that an apolitical court would run far away from, and exactly the kind of move that destroys faith in the courts.

The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.

I don't think that the removal of the Chevron deference means that regulators can't make "reasonable interpretations" of the laws. I don't think one could reasonably say that regulators were prevented from doing so from the founding of the country until 1984. The Chevron deference wasn't giving regulators the ability to make reasonable interpretations, it was a policy of biasing the courts to that interpretation. In my opinion that wasn't a good thing. The courts are inherently biased towards the government in the first place, what with them being part of the government, there's no reason to have an official policy of bias as well.

The parks service can continue to be mandated to "keep the parks clean and safe", but when their regulation that "no minor children shall be allowed in the parks except under the supervision of a related adult" is challenged by the local pre-schools because it prevents them from having field trips to the parks, the courts are no longer required to find that because requiring children to be supervised by relatives is a reasonable interpretation of "keeping the parks safe" that they must then conclude the regulation is within the scope of authority.

>The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.

I find myself hoping that the other branches rather take a sober look at their own behavior and seek to remove the need for the courts to be so involved in the day to day operations of the government. We are in this position largely because for a few decades now Congress has abdicated their responsibility to legislate and regulate and also to represent the people in favor of deadlocking themselves and avoiding responsibility for making hard decisions. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of this. It's exactly the sort of major change in regulation of communications that congress should absolutely be responsible for outlining, and instead they have allowed the executive branch and the courts to fight it out and so we've seen it flip flop from being law to not law multiple times.

unelected, unaccountable judges which are also far more difficult to oust/replace.

And don't answer to the elected officials, thanks to the separation of powers.

> The legislative failure is really that congress hasn't immediately drafted new legislation to reverse this brazen power grab, discipline the rogue justices, and reform the Supreme Court back into its place as an apolitical branch.

A good number of those in congress intend to exploit this opportunity to push ideological and political changes while crippling the efforts of the other members to do anything to stop them. Unless/until there are enough people in congress who see this situation for the danger that it is, there's no chance of new legislation that would do that.

how can we interpret that the legislature doesn't have a problem with chevron because they didn't draft countering legislation, but take the opposite approach when they don't draft countering legislation in the opposite case?

The former status quo existed for about four decades, the new for about a month. I don't think we can read much into it at this point.

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