Windfalls for corporate interests
Friday’s ruling that overturned an important 1984 ruling called Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was a belated victory for Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with all three of his appointees to the high court joining the 6-3 conservative majority.
“The decision was the culmination of a decadelong, billionaire-funded campaign to capture and weaponize the unelected power of the Supreme Court to deliver huge windfalls for corporate interests at the expense of everyday Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former Democratic staffer in Congress who is executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial oversight group.
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Overturning Chevron, a ruling that business interests long disliked, has long been a goal of conservative lawyers, who saw it as giving bureaucrats too much power.
The original decision said courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting laws that were ambiguous, but in Friday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts said that approach was “fundamentally misguided.”
Naturally. The filter must always be profit. Federal agencies don’t profit from the businesses being regulated, so how can they possibly judge fairly? Only those who have a financial motive can interpret the laws correctly.
Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, memorably said in 2018 at a conservative political conference that the president’s judicial selections and the attempt to roll back regulations “are really the flip side of the same coin.”
Well no shit. They’re the same coin and that coin is the coin that matters: make sure that a small minority can pile up the billions and to hell with everything else.
On another deregulatory issue, the Supreme Court in the coming days could act on a petition filed by McGahn and his Jones Day colleagues that seeks to gut the power of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set workplace safety rules.
Naturally. Workplace safety rules are for the schmucks who have to work for a living, while gutting them makes the rich richer.
Why write ambiguous laws in the first place? That’s just asking for trouble.
AoS,
That’s easier said than done. Especially when you’re dealing with technical subjects and areas that change quickly.
Point taken.
There we are. The neo-liberal ideology at work.
Chevron made sense. The agencies are charged with the administration of the laws that Congress enacted for them. The agencies have both lawyers and technical expertise. When they bring all of that to bear on issues that the agency oversees on a daily basis, it makes sense for courts — who are not in the business of executive administration in all the areas/topics served by the government — to defer to how the agency has applied the enabling language of the statute.
The issue is that you can draft very clear specific rules – that might get passed by Congress – except that those only work for the known and considered situations, not those unknown or not considered.
You can draft very clear and unambiguous rules designed to allow technical staff to make decisions, except that it seems it’s impossible to get those passed by Congress.
You can also draft unclear and ambiguous rules to allow technical staff to do their jobs, and that can get passed by Congress, but then SCOTUS says ‘No.’
Elect better congress critters and make the lives of the bad ones a misery.