Comment by losvedir
1 year ago
I've only read your link there, but aren't you mischaracterizing it? The Chevron doctrine isn't what allows agencies like the FCC to make rulings like this, it's what protects their decisions from being overruled by the courts. That is, even if all the justices privately agreed the agency's interpretation had issues, they'd still defer to it. But without Chevron, in that case, they could overrule it.
In this case, considering AI-generated voices "artificial" for the purposes of applying a law seems obvious enough to me that I don't think the Chevron doctrine would apply, personally.
> The Chevron doctrine isn't what allows agencies like the FCC to make rulings like this, it's what protects their decisions from being overruled by the courts.
Yes and it's in cases where a law gives authority and expectations to an agency. In the past, it was left up to experienced and qualified agency specialists to work out how best to implement it because 1) it's their job and 2) because Congress knows it can't write every possible contingency into a law.
Chevron supports this. The SCotUS case is brought by folks who want to shift that determination from agency specialists to judges who don't have the related experience or qualifications. It would effectively allow endless monkey wrenches to be thrown into the oversight process by corporations who aren't keen on oversight.
> shift that determination from agency specialists to judges
Again, that's still not my reading of it. The determination is still done by the agency, right? This is purely about the recourse of folks who don't like what the agency has decided and the futility of appealing it or not.
I feel like both you here and the original poster I replied to are implicitly saying that an agency only truly has the ability to implement laws based on expert qualifications if there's no "check" on them. But this isn't really true for Congress, is it? They make laws around specific topics based on expert input all the time, whether it be around trade or cryptography or whatever, while still having the courts sit above them with the ability to hear out someone who thinks the law is unconstitutional. How is this any different?
It's true that without Chevron, there's more freedom to appeal an agency's decisions. But as a general principle (i.e. not this specific moment in time but say 20 years from now), it seems just as likely to me that an agency is politicized, paid for by corporate donors, etc, as the courts, so it's not clear to me that an un-appealable agency decision is better than one that can be appealed.
Edge cases make great news, but I suspect in our sprawling administrative framework of government agencies, the vast, vast majority of interpretation of laws is done by experts, is relatively fair, and has gone and will continue to go unchallenged. So I don't think the characterization that "interpretation of laws by agencies will move to judges from experts" is fair, on the whole. Maybe only on the controversial parts where there are interests on all sides, but then maybe that's a fair place to have that, too.
>shift that determination from agency specialists to judges
All correct until this bit. They in fact want to shift it back to congress, who should do a better job in specifying what power they delegate to unelected heads of executive branch agencies.
> All correct until this bit. They in fact want to shift it back to congress,
That is one potential, down-the-road outcome of non-qualified judges being inserted into the process. Stalling oversight is the outcome that dominates all of it tho.
> congress, who should do a better job in specifying what power they delegate to unelected heads of executive branch agencies.
A law with every possible contingency can not be written. It's why Congress signals the desired outcomes the language of the law and expects qualified agency employees to bring those outcomes to fruition.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-happens-if-supreme-court-e...
> The idea behind such deference is that expert agencies, accountable to an elected president, are better suited than federal judges to make the policy choices that Congress left open.
>At the time of the 1984 Chevron v. NRDC ruling, Doniger notes, it was widely perceived in legal and political circles that judges in the lower federal courts were inappropriately crafting policy by deciding for themselves what certain laws meant, effectively substituting their own ideas for the discernment of agency experts. “So the Supreme Court was basically saying to the lower courts: Stop inserting your own policy preferences under the guise of interpreting the law,” Doniger says.
> Now the Supreme Court could reopen the door for federal judges to decide how executive-branch agencies should go about their daily business whenever Congress has used ambiguous language
I don't know if you have been following politics recently but this sounds like a bad idea unless the idea is to kill the process (which is the desired outcome of the strategy). Theres no way congress can handle more of a workload nor should they be in charge of this - that should be in the bureaucracy not with the politicos.
> They in fact want to shift it back to congress
When Congress does that and there is a dispute, it ultimately falls to judges to adjudicate until Congress can update the law.
Just because there is an ongoing consensus failure in our democratically elected components doesn’t mean we should skip the democratically elected components
This court has been very consistent about that and we’re going to have it until the 2050s so get with the program
> Just because there is an ongoing consensus failure in our democratically elected components doesn’t mean we should skip the democratically elected components
I'm not sure where you see how Chevron skips those components. Congress gives authority to an agency and indicates what it wants done. Chevron says the agency (using qualified agency specialists) are who Congress intends to work out the many, many details that are impossible to write into effective law.
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