Did Justice Brown let slip that the Chevron Deference Doctrine is about to be a thing of the past at oral arguments in another case?
Mark Smith at Four Boxes Diner covers it and makes a VERY good observation of how not only Justice Brown may have accidentally disclosed that the Chevron Doctrine is about to get pole-axed, and then Justice Kagan trying to rescue Jackson’s misstep. And yes, as gun owners, we want the Chevron Doctrine to get thrown into the dustbin of history.
Worth the watch. Skip to 2:30 to start if you’re already familiar with what the Chevron Deference Doctrine is. If not, just hit play (I’ve queued it to skip over the intro stuff)…
Originally, the Chevron doctrine came about because the Reagan administration wanted to interpret pollution regulations differetly than the environmentalists. The actual ruling said that where a law is ambiguous and multiple interpretions are possible, an agency may use an interpretation that is reasonable if it still comports with the law. This is Adminstrative Law, not criminal law.
This was like a get out of jail free card for Congress. Now Congress could leave “interpretations” to the Agency and they did not have to carefull worder laws that could be understood. Thus, when their party was in power, they could do as they pleased. This also allowed Congress to claim that “This was not what they meant when they wrote the law.” It was just those nasty bureaucrats’ fault, a pox on them.
Agencies loved it even more. Now they had much more latitude to do what was really “right” in their eyes.
I was a Federal Adminstrative Hearing Officer from from 1990 though 2011. These kind of issues were our main job. Could you interpretate it that way? Well, maybe. I had our National Director tell me personally that they had two cases where the same agency argued one interpretation of a published rule in one case and the opposite in the other. He was trying to decide if they could do that! And yet, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” is not a slogan, it is the law. The rules we dealt with were published every month with updates, and were thousands of pages long. Farmers and low income rural residents were supposed to keep up. The actual Agency interpretations were even more thousands of page, and were not published for all to see. The idea that an agency could use whichever interpretation it chose case by case, did not seem to bother the Director.
In the case of ATF, we are dealing with criminal law. We are talking jail time, not just whether that field over there is a wetland. And even then the recent actions taken by ATF are not premitted by the actual wording in the law. Even under Chevron, they are not reasonable. (Well, the way I interpret Chevron.)
Like everything else in life, Chevron doctrine seemd like a good idea at the time, but has been corrupted beyond all recogntion by the government.
Sorry John for the long rant.
Maybe the repeal of Chevron will also help in the reduction of new legislation, as well as the volume of pages in any new legislation, if Congress has to take active participation.
fk chevron doctrine d-suckers & obiden’s alphabet-dindu mofos
brown-stuff was out looking for a biologist to find out what it is
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Executive agencies interpreting what the agency decides ambiguous is NOT how our system of governance works. Chevron does not allow for anyone to be held responsible. Congress critters like it this way. Well,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,say goodbye to your cover congress critters, do your f’ing job and be ready to answer for your job! As far as Jumanji Jackson-Five Khaki I am not surprised the Uni-Vac let the cat out of the bag. What is a woman?
Idiot.
4z2i0g