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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsElie Mystal: We Just Witnessed the Biggest Supreme Court Power Grab Since 1803
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chevron-deference-supreme-court-power-grab/No paywall link
https://archive.li/dce1M
In the biggest judicial power grab since 1803, the Supreme Court today overruled Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 case that instructed the judiciary to defer to the president and the presidents experts in executive agencies when determining how best to enforce laws passed by Congress. In so doing, the court gave itself nearly unlimited power over the administrative state and its regulatory agencies.
Now, if youre not a lawyer, that probably sounds bad, but mainly in a technical sense. Regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission issue influential but deeply complicated rules, so it makes sense that somebody should have final authority over whether and how to enforce those rules. Since we have already made the disastrous decision to allow the Supreme Court to tell us who gets to be president and what women can be forced to do with their bodies, it might not sound like that big of a leap to also let the court decide how much lead can leak into our drinking water or which predators are allowed to sell mortgages.
The thing is: the US Constitution, flawed though it is, has already answered the question of who gets to decide how to enforce our laws. The Constitution says, quite clearly, that Congress passes laws and the President enforces them. The Supreme Court, constitutionally speaking, has no role in determining whether Congress was right to pass the law, or if the executive branch is right to enforce it, or how presidents should use the authority granted to them by Congress. So, for instance, if Congress passes a Clean Air Act (which it did in in 1963) and the president creates an executive agency to enforce it (which President Richard Nixon did in 1970), then its really not up to the Supreme Court to say well, actually, clean air doesnt mean what the EPA thinks it means.
For an unelected panel of judges to come in, above the agencies, and tell them how the president is allowed to enforce laws, is a perversion of the constitutional order and separation of powersand a repudiation of democracy itself.
But repudiating democracy to expand its own power is exactly what the Supreme Court did today in its ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned Chevron. In a 6-3 decision, which split exactly along party lines, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the courtsand, more particularly, his court and the people who have bought and paid for the justices on itare the sole arbiters of which laws can be enforced and what enforcement of those laws must look like. Roberts ruled that courts, and only courts, are allowed to figure out what Congress meant to do and impose those interpretations on the rest of society. He wrote that agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.
*snip*
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ultralite001
(1,020 posts)bucolic_frolic
(45,600 posts)It's a fascist majority on the court now. We have lost.
Eliot Rosewater
(31,986 posts)Fiendish Thingy
(17,233 posts)If Dems had control of congress and the WH, and the courage to expand the courts and pass enforceable reforms. At the same time, congress would pass new laws affirming the 1984 ruling as the law of the land.
Then, the executive branch could once again regulate laws, and if anyone objected, say OK, lets send it to SCOTUS and see what they say now.
a kennedy
(31,282 posts)Laws can be written, passed, AND signed into law preventing this debacle from EVER taking effect. 🤬 🤬 🤬
dalton99a
(83,124 posts)MOMFUDSKI
(7,080 posts)their offices with the door closed.
onenote
(43,816 posts)Without it, there would have been no Brown v Board of Education, no Miranda rights, no Row v Wade, Griswold v Connecticut, Obergefell, and a long list of cases where the Supreme Court asserted its role as the final arbiter of the constitution where neither the legislature nor the executive branch showed any willingness to act.
moondust
(20,282 posts)It's not just Supreme Court judges who like luxury motorhomes and private jet rides to fancy retreats.
orangecrush
(20,865 posts)Time to start ignoring the fuckers the same way the pukes do
republianmushroom
(16,301 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(36,123 posts)It ignores law, logic, precedent, the U.S. Constitution, and consequences in its quest to impose its extreme ideology on the nation.