This is What Power to the People Really Look Like
The Supreme Court is Finally Acting to Keep the Executive Branch in Its Place
(I’m skipping talking about last night’s debate. It was pointless. Biden is lacking the mental capacity to serve as president regardless of what anyone thinks of his political ideas. Trump couldn’t give a decent speech of his life depended on it. Ugh.)
I’m pretty impressed with the current Supreme Court. They’re overturning decisions that had no Constitutional basis on the regular. In the most recent decision, they overturned Chevron V the National Resources Defense Council and limited the power of the agencies of the Executive branch to make their own rules and (particularly in this case) have their own courts. Per CBS News:
"Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires," Roberts wrote for the court. The chief justice called the earlier decision a "judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties."
The framework required courts to defer to an agency's interpretation of laws passed by Congress if it is reasonable. Calls for it to be overturned came from not only conservative legal scholars, but some of the justices themselves who have said courts are abdicating their responsibility to interpret the law.
They’re right. The executive branch is not made up of legislators and judges. It is the responsibility of Congress to make laws and of the EXECUTive branch to EXECUTE them. This is not hard to understand.
To put this an other way: The company I work for has policies that are set by our Board of Directors. They are handed down to the people below them. If the Site Manager of a particular location (who has a lot more authority than I do if we’re being honest) decides to violate a policy he can, and probably will be, fired. It’s not his job to set policy. It’s his job to follow it. That’s what the executive branch is for.
Or, as the quoted on ENR:
"Chevron cannot be reconciled with the [1946] Administrative Procedures Act by presuming that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies," said Chief Justice John Roberts In Loper Bright Enterprises vs Raimondo. "That presumption does not approximate reality. A statutory ambiguity does not necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a court, resolve the resulting interpretive question."
Right. The Executive Branch doesn’t make the rules. If Congress fails in its duty to provide laws that are enforceable that’s their bad. The rules can be clarified by Congress ( in the form of clarifying legislation) or the Agency can seek redress through the Judicial branch whose job consists of interpreting the freaking law. That’s literally what they get paid for.
Going back to the CBS story, Democrat and their appointees aren’t happy:
The court split along ideological lines in the dispute, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson were in dissent. Kagan read portions of her dissent from the bench.
The court's ruling in a pair of related cases is a significant victory for the conservative legal movement, which has long aimed to unwind or weaken the 1984 decision in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. Critics of that landmark ruling, which involved a challenge to a regulation enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, have said the so-called Chevron doctrine gives unelected federal bureaucrats too much power in crafting regulations that touch on major areas of American life, such as the workplace, the environment and health care.
"Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires," Roberts wrote for the court. The chief justice called the earlier decision a "judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties."
The framework required courts to defer to an agency's interpretation of laws passed by Congress if it is reasonable. Calls for it to be overturned came from not only conservative legal scholars, but some of the justices themselves who have said courts are abdicating their responsibility to interpret the law.
The Supreme Court's reversal of the Chevron decision also further demonstrates the willingness of its six-justice conservative majority to jettison decades of past rulings. In June 2022, the court overturned Roe v. Wade, dismantling the constitutional right to abortion, and in June 2023, it ended affirmative action in higher education.
"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law," Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. "As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country's administrative czar."
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the Supreme Court's decision as "deeply troubling" and said in a statement that it undermines the ability of agencies to employ their expertise.
"Republican-backed special interests have repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court to block common-sense rules that keep us safe, protect our health and environment, safeguard our financial system, and support American consumers and workers," she said. "And once again, the Supreme Court has decided in the favor of special interests, just as it did when they sought to gut long-standing protections for clean water, thwart efforts to respond to a global pandemic, and block the cancelation of crippling student debt for tens of millions of Americans."
Any Republican that doesn’t get nervous any time a Democrat (or the judges they appoint) uses the phrase “common sense” isn’t paying attention. To the left, “common sense” equates to whatever they want and to hell with what anyone else thinks.
Justice Kagan seems to miss the point entirely. The job of agencies is not to employ their expertise to make rules. The job of agencies is to do as they’re told to do. It is not to usurp the powers of the other two branches.
The results of a too powerful executive are well known throughout history. All I need to do is bring up the names: Joseph Stalin. Adolph Hitler. Mao Zdong. Pol Pot. Fidel Castro. As far as I’m concerned the only overreaching executives that ever really got what they deserved were Julius Caesar, Nicolae Ceaușescu and Benito Mussolini. Why? Because they were all executed by some of the people they claimed to rule.
Congress exists for a reason. It’s job is to make the laws. If they’re not making things clear enough in the legislation than they need to make adjustments on their end. The job of the Executive Branch is not to run the country nor is it to rule the country. The job of the Executive Branch is to do as it is told. Speaking in a Constitutional sense, the only member of the Executive Branch who has any say in what the laws are is the president and the vice president. The VP, of course, can vote in the Senate to break ties. The President has the right to either sign, ignore or veto legislation. That’s it folks.
It is good to see the Constitution winning in court again. Let’s hope it continues to do so.