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posted ago by Narg ago by Narg +38 / -0

The Verge, a firmly establishment tech-oriented site, is as freaked about Chevron's overturn as every other entity that assumes the federal government should control everything. The idea of honest regulation -- by anything OTHER than forcible government (e.g., Underwriter Labs -- now just "UL" -- and the National Fire Protection Association, NFPA, both established in the 1800s) just doesn't occur to them.

The Verge just published an overview of what they see coming in various areas (tech regulation, visa and immigration law, environmental regs, etc) from the Supreme Court's "power grab":

https://www.theverge.com/24188365/chevron-scotus-net-neutrality-dmca-visa-fcc-ftc-epa

Since the New Deal era, the bulk of the functioning US government is the administrative state — think the acronym soup of agencies like the EPA, FCC, FTC, FDA, and so on. Even when Capitol Hill is not mired in deep dysfunction, the speed at which Congress and the courts operate no longer seems suitable for modern life. Both industry and ordinary people look to the administrative state, rather than legislators, for an immediate answer to their problems. And since 1984, the administrative state largely ran on one Supreme Court precedent: Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

That decision has now been overturned. Admin law is not always interesting, but the simple fact is when it comes to the day-to-day, agencies are the most impactful part of the federal government. No single policy writer at The Verge can fully articulate the impact of Friday’s Supreme Court decision and how profound its effects will be. The administrative state touches everything around us: net neutrality, climate change, clean air and water, and what scant consumer protections we have.

The true scope of this ruling will not be immediately felt, and what replaces Chevron deference is still unclear. The regulatory state has been under steady attack from an increasingly conservative judiciary for a long time. Some of the agencies we follow most closely were kneecapped even before this decision — one expert we talked to said that Chevron had been a “dead letter for quite some time.”

Still, this is a formal turning point. The biggest policy stories at The Verge have centered around federal agencies. And for a long time, the kind of regulation that actually kept up with the pace of technology was mostly coming out of agencies. It is in the years to come that we will wonder, “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” or “How can a court just unilaterally do that?” about issues that range from trivial to life-threatening.

We’ll look back on this moment as a pivotal part of how we got there.

(What follows is The Verge's view of how Chevron will or might impact various agencies and regulatory doctrines; example below):

Overruling Chevron is essentially a big power grab, experts tell The Verge. It pushes the agency’s technical experts to the side when it comes to crafting environmental protections. In recent years, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court had already whittled down the agency’s regulatory authority — notably, by strengthening the major questions doctrine that Heinzerling describes as “the anti-Chevron.”

. . . “The overall pattern here is clear — it’s not just in this decision — the court majority is on a rampage designed to make it harder for the government to protect us,” Doniger said.