Why do you see a blow to the chevron deference doctrine as a good thing?
I'd say that the doctrine properly tries to keep the supreme court, the least democratically responsible branch of US federal government, from being the most powerful of the three branches of government.
The buerocrats take their orders from the president, and if they don't can be overruled and fired by the president, who is elected by the people every 4 years. That's a pretty big difference, no?
The "lifelong bureaucrats" are typically (but not always, see the CDC) policy and subject matter experts.
Chevron deference's main purpose is to free Congress from writing exhaustive laws. If the executive branch does something Congress doesn't like, they can change the law and make it more specific. Of course Congress does almost nothing, so when you say it has to take legislative action to regulate something, what you're effectively doing is deregulating it.
This decision follows more from the Court where they pick and choose what they doom in this way based on their personal politics, contrary to precedent and reliance interests.
We shouldn't think too hard about what this Court does; it's a nakedly ideological power grab that's the endgame of a generation long effort by Conservatives to control the US through the court as they slide further and further into permanent minority status. Future generations will look back on this era as one of infamy.
> The "lifelong bureaucrats" are typically (but not always, see the CDC) policy and subject matter experts.
We really, really needed one of those groups of unelected bureaucrats to be policy and subject matter experts, and they weren't. But don't worry, all the others we haven't actually checked are!
I'll try and read into your low-effort dismissal here a critique of my singling out the CDC and explain further:
The CDC is a relatively unique case of an institution that was really gutted by a mistake decades ago (the swine flu vaccine in the late 70s [0]) and then got some pretty bad Trump-nominated leadership [1] [2]). Elections matter, it turns out.
What agency would you hold up as an example of competence, sanity and political independence, then?
The FAA's got egg on its face from the whole 737-Max situation, the FDA is approving vaccines for under-5 year olds despite no evidence of benefit (and has had a few reviewers resign in protest after the same set of vaccines were approved for other age demographics), I'd bet dollars to donuts that people are going to be mightily unhappy with the Treasury in 6 months, the DOJ has all-but-eliminated the jury trial while providing generally substandard prisons, I've heard many things about the VA but I don't recall a single positive thing, and there's a ton of things that could be said of the DEA/ATF/FBI/DHS gang but very few of them are positive.
Your post is a couple of pot shots at departments that do thousands of things every day and some unsubstantiated claims. Here's guest piece by those two FDA staffers who resigned explaining their disagreement with the administration [0]; the headline is "We don't need universal booster shots. We need to reach the unvaccinated." It's a pretty good piece written by people who sound--at least to me--like policy and subject matter experts. The VA is the largest socialized health care system in the world. Etc. etc.
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I will say a couple of things to try and reach an agreement here. The first is that our gov't is pretty corrupt, even the executive branch (remember the CDC pulling down testing/masking requirements for flying around the holidays last year?) and it's pretty clear to everyone who looks at it. I'll defend the career civil servants, but the political appointees? Generally nah.
The second is that the US press is basically junk. Their incentives are so screwy that even people who want to be fair and rigorous are forced out in favor of profiteers, which creates an awful dynamic amongst viewers and readers. For example, this article is "Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69" [1]. This one says NBC Nightly News spent 31 minutes on emails and 8 minutes on issues [2]. What were readers/viewers supposed to think? Has literally anything been covered so strenuously and consistently? It got more air time than actual terrorism.
How do you see the Supreme Court as being more democratically responsible than the administrative personel of the executive branch?
To me, it seems clear that the "administrative state" is overseen by the president, who can overrule them and fire individual people, and the president is elected by the people every four years, and that makes the executive branch more democratically responsible than the supreme court, which is not elected by the people, and who serve for life with no democratic accountability.
But I'm open to hearing your argument for how the supreme court is more democratically responsible than the offices of the executive branch! Maybe we don't mean the same thing by "democratically responsible".
> Supreme Court can just ignore its own precedents
I’m not a fan of the current Court, but stare decisis has never been binding. Landmark rulings are landmarks because the create or break precedent. Courts have been doing that since there were courts.
Stare decides bound Casey, at least. It's never before been ignored when it established a new individual right (Dobbs overturns precedent to remove a right, which has never been done before). This really can't be minimized as "Courts gonna Court".
I haven't read the opinion in detail but it doesn't appear they touched Chevron, merely ruling this particular case falls under the preexisting major questions doctrine/exception to Chevron.
If you read the dissent they seem to be claiming the majority opinion greatly expands the circumstances in which the major questions exception applies. Which would be a big hit to Chevron making it apply in far fewer cases.
This is a decent definition: "administrative law principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer." The ruling basically undermines the previous notion of the judiciary deferring to an administrative agency, because it just didn't, therefore forcing the legislature to be more explicit in its desires.
