Chevron

The future, though imminent, is obscure.--Churchill

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Chevron means 'badge.' It specifically now means an inverted 'v,' like a 'pfc.' It has a wonderful origin:

late 14c., in heraldry, "a device in the shape of an inverted V," from Old French chevron "rafter; chevron" (13c.), so called because it looks like rafters of a shallow roof, from Vulgar Latin *caprione, from Latin caper "goat" (see cab); the hypothetical connection between goats and rafters being the animal's angular hind legs. Compare gambrel, also Latin capreolus "props, stays, short pieces of timber for support," literally "wild goat, chamoix."

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Chevron

The rule adopted in the 1984 Chevron Case was a well-intentioned effort to free the executive branch from judicial micromanagement.

Chevron claimed for agencies the power to change how the courts interpret the meaning of laws passed by Congress. Under Chevron, where a statute is “ambiguous,” courts defer to the agency’s interpretation — even if the agency had a different interpretation under the last president.

Defenders of Chevron say that it would unsettle precedent and violate the doctrine of stare decisis to overrule the decision, but Chevron itself unsettles both precedents and the expectations of regulated parties by allowing agencies to flip-flop in how they read the law without going through Congress to change it.

An NR summary of the question is this: "The two cases heard Wednesday, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, were brought by herring fishermen whose budgets were strained by intrusive regulation. Congress authorized the secretary of commerce and the National Marine Fisheries Service to “require that one or more observers be carried on board a vessel . . . for the purpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation and management of the fishery” — for example, to prevent overfishing.

The problem: The agency (the NMFS) ran short on its budget to hire observers. It could have asked Congress for more money, or for the power to make the fishermen pay for their own regulation. It did neither. The statute never said anything about the NMFS having the power to compel the fishermen to pay the costs of the observers. Imposing that cost is a further exercise of government power, above and beyond compelling the vessels to carry the observer. When pressed at argument to identify the government’s authority, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued for a chain of inferences from four separate parts of the statute, none of them close to an explicit grant of that power. Yet, lower courts used Chevron to say that because the statute never says who pays for the observers, it is ambiguous, and they deferred to the agency when it claimed that power. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, this is a rule under which “the government always wins” against the individual citizen or business."

Law should have a few basics, including a connection to reality in both logistics and costs. The criteria should be to advantage the citizen, not the government itself. And the government should not be allowed to mandate the creation of elephant ears and giraffe necks in honor of some idea of consistency. 

Underlying this self-admitted spotty thinking is the arrogant referral of responsibility: 'Let's invade Normandy. The non-comms can figure the details out.' 

The closer you look, the more common this is. For example, the decision that global warming is a threat to life--true or not--is only the first step of countless steps. The rest will not just 'fall into place.'