Legal experts gathered Friday to trash some of the recently released decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Slate Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick explained the unwriting of a 40-year precedent in the Chevron case, which the High Court had not made. The federal government decides a number of regulations, employing experts, scientists, doctors, chemists, and others to determine what is or isn't safe for the American people. Some examples are how long meat can be unrefrigerated during transport, how much lead is safe for drinking water, and even recommendations about cooks washing their hands after using the bathroom.
"So, Chevron is essentially shorthand for a long-standing tradition that says that if there's an ambiguous statute, the courts defer to the agency itself and their interpretation of how to read that statute. Why? Because agencies are teeming with people who know the science and understand how the climate works, who understand how health care works, and who understand how guns work," said Lithwick.
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The Supreme Court essentially "said, nope. From here on in, we're going to give courts the power to decide how agency regulations are interpreted." Lithwick confessed she didn't want to be alarmist but that it is "a wholesale transfer of power over federal regulatory agencies. Clean water, clean air, guns, health care, monetary policy- all of it is now shifted away from federal agencies and into the laps of courts."
Amid her cynicism, she bashed the court for being incapable of controlling its own website this week. At one point, the Idaho abortion case was posted online, improperly formatted, and then quickly removed.
"It is hard to understand how they can have the kind of expertise to talk about nuanced things like climate and health care if they can't even sort out their own in-house procedures," she quipped.
It's a comment that comes after Justice Neil Gorsuch penned the Court's opinion and mistakenly referred to pollution as nitrous oxide and not nitrogen oxide. The former is often referred to as "laughing gas" and is sometimes used at the dentist. The latter is pollution.
See the conversation below or click the link.