For anyone curious, this bill is fighting against the conservative SCOTUS decision that basically said fossil fuel and other companies don’t have to listen to the EPA or follow environmental regulations if the company has a “reasonable”(undefined) argument against said regulation.
So this law should get made. Get made good.
Regulations are “unconstitutional”? Hmmmmmmm 🤔 Is SCOTUS bound by anything? Seems like they can rule however they like.
I think their argument is more that the agencies aren’t allowed to be the ones to say how a law is applied as far as regulations go. If a regulation is vague enough the EPA isn’t allowed to clarify anymore, it needs to go to a (more than likely rubber stamp) court where the judges decide, instead of, you know, anyone who would actually have expertise… It’s legally “reasonable” but practically insane.
Why aren’t the bodies allowed to say how relevant laws are applied? Isn’t the whole point behind regulatory bodies that the government will grant regulators certain powers with legislation?
I’m not a legal expert, but in Australia at least there are a bunch of regulators that work to legislation, but they totally come up with extra clarifications and rules themselves within the powers they’ve been granted, and you are obligated to follow those rules.
For example: the fair work commission in Australia sets the minimum wage every year, no legislation required. Employers can’t just decide they’re unreasonable and not follow them, unless they want to be taken to court (or go to jail, in certain states like Victoria).
Now, I have no idea what the laws are that give the US EPA their powers, but either SCOTUS is totally out of line here, or the legislation sucks.
SCOTUS is unchecked by the rest of the federal government. The only thing that would limit their power is a constitutional amendment, which requires 38 states to individually ratify it at the level of their state governments, not their federal congresspeople.
There is literally no way for congress to affect the supreme court once it has 9 justices, or contradict its rulings on laws they call “unconstitutional”, short of impeaching supreme court justices or packing the court with more than 9 justices. Once enough of the court is full of fascists or enablers, it’s EXTREMELY hard to escape fascism without a constitutional convention.
You could instruct the federal agencies to ignore court rulings, effectively undoing Marbury vrs Madison.
That’s a constitutional crisis, but what is the court gonna do? Call the FBI? Send in the military?
You can ask the Cherokee people what the court does with an uncooperative federal government, but you won’t find any in Georgia.
Maybe that’s just fascism with our side in charge though.
Is SCOTUS bound by anything?
flipping open my Lockean theory of self-governance
Strictly speaking, the power of government is in its ability to achieve (relatively) peaceful compliance. The SCOTUS decision creates an opportunity for individuals to behave in defiance of the written law with a certain fearlessness. A President can go full Andrew Jackson and tell the judges to enforce that decision, but he’s still got to command a bureaucracy full of people who can be swayed in the other direction.
What happens to a regulation that nobody is willing to enforce? What happens to a federal regulation that runs afoul of state law, in a district where municipal/state law enforcement will enthusiastically arrest and local DAs prosecute a federal agent?
I would say that’s the real power of the SCOTUS. Opening the legal door for disobedience and negligence at the federal level, while state-level revolt occurs downstream.
In theory that was supposed to be the strength of SCOTUS, that being secure in their employment for life (or until retirement), they had no incentive to judge along party lines for fear of future prospects. However, we’ve seen that judges can still be both very partisan and entirely unqualified and we can now do nothing to remove them. Turns out bribery and threats still work on them
The Loper Bright ruling was that when taken on appeal that the courts no longer have to accept a reasonable agency interpretation over a reasonable (or more reasonable) interpretation by the other party.
And the rulings isn’t just for the EPA but all other federal agencies like the IRS, ICE, and the FDA. This bill is a double edged sword depending on who has the executive seat.
There’s at least a possibility of the executive having enough expertise to regulate reasonably. The courts don’t have the resources, but they’ve grabbed that power to themselves.
I mean that power was there since article 3 got drafted, and reaffirmed by the text of the APA.
The issue is the legislature not being able to pass laws due to the filibuster. This has lead to agencies being forced to take up their own interpretations to adapt language beyond it’s original meaning to attempt to complete their goals, like w/ the Loper Bright case.
Basically agencies were given power unchecked without passing any laws giving them that power. Supreme court decision was correct. Congress needs to get off their butts and get laws passed if they want them so bad, and stop relying on shaky historical precedents.
Kind of hard to pass bills when one political party is dedicated to nothing but corruption and obstruction but ok.
I honestly agree with the decision in a vacuum, but in reality I can’t help but feel the decision was made very much with corporate interests in mind. Yeah congress should’ve gotten their ducks in a row long before now, but the real winner here is corporations, not constituents.
Can you imagine a full majority blue government again? Last time we got health care light, who knows what we might get a little of this time?
Maybe some of that freedom your nutjobs keep banging on about.
Make no mistake that small progress is still progress and given the amount of money spent on regression, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
If given the choice of something better, never go for the other option because the first is not better enough
don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This sentiment is way too rare. Personally I’m a fan of using “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”
It needs to be selectively applied though. We should fight for perfection, but we shouldn’t avoid small gains in favor of large aspirations.
don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This sentiment is way too rare
Except literally every time someone on the left points out the Dem leadership habit of inching in the right direction while not doing much to stop their fascist counterparts from yarding if not miling in the opposite.
What little progress conservative Democrats DO graciously deign to bestow on the unwashed masses is the equivalent of getting a 2% raise in a year where your unavoidable expenses such as food, shelter, and medicine rose by double digits.
That’s not good. That’s insufficient.
These are hyperbolic times.
The internet age has all but murdered nuance.
The problem can be that some progress can be used to placate the masses by halting the momentum.
Obamacare was a step in the right direction, but also enough to kill the momentum towards the actual solutions that would have provided universal healthcare. Even those wouldn’t have been perfect, but now the drive has plataeued and good enough for most people means we won’t get good enough for everyone any time soon.
Decriminalizing weed instead of legalizing and regulating is another. It doesn’t actually solve the inherent problems with the war on drugs because the drug trade that does involve criminal activity is still present. This kind of situation can backfire by reinforcing people’s belief in the lies about drugs inherently causing violent crime.
So the sentiment is correct, but not all progress is good enough and partial progress can be a long term negative.
Make no mistake that small progress is still progress
That’s an argument I remember from under Obama. But the theory was that these small progressions would compound over time. In practice, the Dems don’t make progress, they inhibit it. Liberals draw in an enormous amount of labor and financial power to campaign, then immediately sell out to corporate interests. They pass stop-gap bills to splinter progressive movements into factions of haves and have-nots. Then they collapse in the face of a reactionary resurgence.
The reactionaries impose huge reversals of existing New Deal and Great Society programs. They engage in flagrant criminality without any form of censure. They prosecute wars to loot natural resources abroad. Then they ship domestic capital overseas to dilute labor power at home and swell the ranks of the underemployed. They lard us up with debts to the same plutocrats who put them in office and leave Democrats with the bill when they finally slink out of office. And they balloon the national security state to surveil, suppress, and murder protesters and dissidents in nascent left-wing movements.
The “small progress” is a ratchet. It isn’t progress at all. We’re regressing rapidly. The liberal party seems content to prevent any kind of contrary political pressure, while the conservative movement goes all-in on paramilitary fascism.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say we had a full blue government. Technically we had it but our majority in the senate didn’t really exist due to false Dems like Manchin
Plus the filibuster requires 2/3, not a simple majority to get anything done.
But doesn’t need 2/3rds to remove, only majority. Which then gets back to the “pseudo” dems that appear anything it gets close to having progressive legislation passed
Manchin wasn’t even in the Senate yet. Lieberman was an independent that endorsed Romney 3 years later.
There were senators from Louisiana and Missouri in that majority.
Also Franken wasn’t seated until like June because of recounts and lawsuits. Ted Kennedy was on deaths door and passed away 2 months later. His replacement was seated a couple months after that and then Scott Brown won in fucking Massachusetts in January.
They ended up with something like 109 working days in which Democrats could override a Republican filibuster. They passed 2 major pieces of legislation. Dodd Frank and the ACA.
Harris healthcare plan in 2020 was to the left of Bidens, She called for Medicare for all. She dissagreed with Bernie about banning private insurance.
She was not against universal healthcare. I doubt she is now. If Dems sweep the house and somehow picked up 10 seats in the Senate (impossible) she might try to go for it.
It’s not impossible in 2026 for Dems to make big gains in the Senate, but it is very, very unlikely.
Can you imagine a full majority blue government again?
Easily. But when so many of the elected officials on Team Blue are as subservient to private business interests, plutocrats, and foreign state governments as their counterparts on Team Red, I’m not sure what good it’ll do.
100 Joe Manchins and Kristen Sinemas won’t do us any favors.
Then why are you here?
If you don’t believe in electoral politics that’s fine. But you should be off organizing union drives, or mutual aid societies, or literally any other venue for democratic power.
Why would you care which corporate shill holds office?
Your presence here suggests that it does, in fact, matter who wins elections, or which team holds power.
Great, now do Citizens United, Trump v US, Roe and maybe try Dred Scott again but where corporations don’t have all the same rights as people and can’t be criminally prosecuted.
One step at a time bud.
If you try and do everything at once you get nothing done at all.
Unless you do everything at once with conflicting interests across different parts of “everything” and you get an omnibus bill, which is the only way to actually get anything done in congress nowadays (for some god-forsaken reason)
Let’s fucking go!
The courts kind of already denying the authority of the legislature on this. These agencies were created and given authority by congress already.
Yeah, they’ve gotten to the point of saying the legislature cannot delegate it’s authority. If it stands it functionally makes modern government impossible. If Congress cannot delegate to the executive, and it cannot take on executive style decision like the Westminster system, the government just cannot function.
Let SCOTUS enforce it. Why anyone still listens to that nut job chorus is beyond me.
They won’t have to. Lower courts do it.
Whats going to happen is that every time a corporation doesn’t like a regulation, they will sue to stop it. If possible in the specific case, they will shop for the right circuit court that’s stuffed with judges favorable to them. The regulation will be stopped from taking hold while the case is in process. The federal bench is already overloaded, so this will take years. The corp will continue as they were in the meantime.
Even worse, a corp can now bring up cases against old regulations that started affecting them. An old corp getting into a new area, or a spinoff subsidiary taking their old business, could challenge any regulation that suddenly affects them.
This isn’t like, say, school integration, where the President helps out the enforcement by sending the National Guard. Everything happens within the courts, plus the agencies respecting a court ordered stop like they always have.
They overturned the courts previous decision. Technically it wasn’t a law before, it just was heavily implied (as in Congress specifically left things vague bc they wanted federal agencies to fill in the blanks in accordance to the Chevron doctrine).
Basically, there wasn’t any part that was unconstitutional, they just said the court was overstepping their boundaries when they “created” the Chevron doctrine.
Edit: please read the comment below, it seems like my understanding wasn’t quite right
The court basically said it was a separation of powers issue. The basic powers of the branches are:
- The Legislative (Congress) creates laws
- The Executive (President) actually puts those laws into action (they are “executed” by this aptly named branch)
- The Judicial (courts) interpret legality of the actions of the Executive branch based on the wording of the laws passed by Congress, and the constitutionality of those laws (that is, if the law itself is even legal to be enforced)
The Chevron Deference doctrine was the courts saying “Congress occasionally writes laws vaguely and we don’t have expertise on every subject matter, so we are going to defer the decision-making of what exactly the law means to actual experts in the Executive branch.” Congress has written laws using this logic, intentionally granting power to the Executive branch that would otherwise reside with Congress (i.e. Congress says “how much of X particulate in the air is too much? We could write a specific law stating that 500 ppm is too much, but it’s a lot of work to do that for every particulate, and the science gets updated over time, so we’ll just tell the Executive to place ‘reasonable limits’ and call it a day.”)
Now the Court has said “That power you’ve ceded to the Executive branch? That should be ours because it’s our job to interpret what laws mean. We now decide how much of X particulate is too much, even when we mix it up with Y particulate.”
It’s a blatant power grab by the Court and a separation of powers issue. Congress SHOULD be able to remedy it by specifying that this decision-making power should reside with the Executive branch and the Judiciary won’t be able to say “no mine”. I mean, this Court WILL, but a legitimate Court wouldn’t.
