alt Hacker NewsChevron clasically has ignored health and safety requirements to the point where there was once the “Chevron Doctrine” which deferred legal interpretations to specialized regulatory agencies which established clearer guidance against murky legislative directives. The Doctrine was recently overturned by the ostensibly rogue SCOTUS as highlighted by the harvard business review: https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-end-of-the-chevron-doctrine-is-b...
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Chevron didn’t establish clearer guidelines.
It was weaponized by both parties to create defacto laws without proper legal procedure. It should’ve been unconstitutional from the beginning as only Congress can make laws. Regulatory agencies are far easier to control, generally contain administration-friendly plants, and are not expected to provide any justification for their decisions. The result is laws that change as the wind blows, confusions, and rights restrictions done by people who should have no business doing so. The “reasonable interpretation” rule allowed Congress to completely defer to them and force citizens to spend tremendous capital getting a case to the Supreme Court.
Chevron’s overturn was objectively a huge win and hardly a “rogue” decision. That editorialization is not a fair representation of the problems it has caused when regulatory agencies begin attempting to regulate constitutional rights. It was overly vague and gave far too much power to people who cannot be trusted with it.
We shouldn’t need Chevron Deference to make laws that protect people from harm done by corporations. Period. If we do, it’s a failure of Congress to do their jobs and a mechanism should be in place to have a “reset button” (like many other countries when they form a government).
"Under Chevron, if a judge found that the agency had made a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous congressional directive, they were obliged to defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law, effectively ending any substantive review of a challenged rule. The repeal of Chevron is a huge blow to regulators, evidenced by the fact that the decision had been cited more than 18,000 times over 40 years."
the Chevron Doctrine is new to me; it appears that the parent comment was not answering "why was it banned internationally" but rather emphasizing weakness in US procedures
That's a rather rose colored way of framing what Chevron was. It essentially removed the role of the judiciary in settling disputes. In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
And due to widespread regulatory capture, this is hardly some social benefit. The original case Chevron Doctrine was based on [1] essentially came down to the EPA interpreting anti-pollution laws in a way enabling companies to expand pollution-causing constructions with no oversight. The EPA was then sued, and defeated, by an environmental activist group, but then that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court and Chevron Deference was born.
Other examples are the FCC deeming broadband internet as a "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" (which would have meant common-carrier obligations would have applied), and so on. Another one [3] - Congress passed legislation deeming that power plants must use the "best technology available" to "minimize the adverse environmental impact" of their water intakes/processing. The EPA interpretation instead allowed companies to use a cost-benefit analysis and pick cheaper techs. And I could go on. Chevron Deference was an abomination.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_&_Telecommunica...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entergy_Corp._v._Riverkeeper_I....