Laws require a certain amount of ambiguity or they don’t work. Laws that are too specific don’t apply to all intended situations.
Congress, indeed all legislatures, are bad at writing laws. Bad at understanding the unintentional effects of the language they use. They also are very bad at listening to subject experts
Many new laws aren’t written by congress members or members of the state legislature for state laws. They are written and pushed by lobbyists.
Getting a law changed or enacted takes a really long time and, right now, Congress is nonfunctional.
Federal agencies are the subject experts for laws involving their regulations. They are in the best position to interpret an ambiguous law in their wheelhouse. They have rules making processes. Lobbyists absolutely affect that process. If a rule is considered bad, the interested parties can sue.
Many of the laws creating regulations passed since Chevron may not have the explicit language granting fed agencies interpreting authority because Chevron existed
Has Chevron been applied excessively? Probably. Should Chevron be revamped? Yes. Can we trust this SCOTUS majority to change or revamp Chevron with fairness, a will to protect people from the predatory big businesses, and an understanding of the long term consequences? Hell no we can’t.
The cases before SCOTUS are being pushed and used as a vehicle to gut the ability of federal agencies to regulate. That is a bad outcome for the people living in the US. The Supreme Court cooked up another phony case.
bzzzt the law doesn’t need ambiguity. It needs adaptability. Adaptability can be provided by ambiguity, but it’s not required. The proper amount of ambiguity is probably non-zero, but that’s because the proper amount of anything unpleasant is non-zero, due to the costs involved in reducing the unpleasant to zero. No ambiguity is required. Ambiguity is not a lack of specificity. It’s a lack of clarity in meaning.
Lack of clarity is not a feature, unless your intent is to create traps. Traps will be used against the disfavored and non powerful. Which is to say, they will be used against you.
True, however, Congress has been passing laws that can be enforced either civilly or criminally, and it’s nonsensical that something could be wrong civilly, but not criminally, for the exact same conduct. That this case doesn’t directly affect the Rule of Lenity doesn’t mean that Chevron doesn’t negatively affect other ambiguous laws.
This will be my last comment on the issue
A law can’t be adaptable without ambiguity. Introduce any ability to adapt and you introduce ambiguity because adaptability requires interpretation.
You can’t legislate everything. There are real world issues and pressures involved with with law making. The ones that make the federal register (and state equivalents) necessary. You just can’t get that detailed in a law passed by a legislature. It would take forever to actually legislate all the necessary regulations. It would also lock in stupid shit. Oh, is that form messed up? Wait, we actually need to require more disclosures! We changed our website for reporting that info- whelp, stuck with paper until we can wrangle Congress to amend the law!
Congress passes the broad strokes of federal regulations. The goals and major limits. Then the agencies step in to make rules to bring those laws to fruition. This is how the law works in the United States at both the federal level and state level. There should be a statue that provides what Chevron does. But again, real world problems with getting laws passed as well as a perception it wasn’t necessary because Chevron is supposed to be settled law.
The idea that Chevron allows agencies to make interpretations that are contrary to the source law and courts can’t do anything is a flat out lie. Chevron requires a reasonable interpretation. That first prong of the test. SCOTUS has chosen to ignore that part. They could easily just rule the regulation about the fishers paying the wages for observers isn’t a reasonable interpretation. Which would be backed by the fact that the feds did walk it back. The agency even reimbursed those who were charged. This is another zombie case where the actual remedy has already been achieved.
Ambiguity is defined as a lack of clarity. You may not be able to legislate everything, but to give a random example, the controlled substances act does not require ambiguity to be adapted to control new substances. It is very clear how new substances get scheduled. This adaptability does require interpretation, but there is no real ambiguity involved.
Chevron notionally requires a reasonable interpretation. However, courts are lazy. It’s easier to go “well, they have an interpretation, why should I over rule the experts?” “They have a rule, therefore the law must be ambiguous”.
It’s the same problem as qualified immunity: it’s an easy way to get the case off the docket. It’s not that the courts can’t do anything. It’s that they won’t do anything. And it’s worse if you’re disfavored, because the judges are human, so why should they put the extra work into not just hitting the easy button?
States have gotten rid of Chevron type deference, and they don’t have a problem with the legislature having to pass laws to fix typos in forms.
