Here's a tidbit of interesting news that I missed last week: liberals are breathing a sigh of relief because the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the government in American Hospital Association v. Becerra.
Liberals were anticipating this ruling with trepidation. The issue in question was related to the way Medicare reimburses hospitals for certain prescription drugs, and by itself it's not hugely important. But the bigger issue was how much deference courts should give the government when it enacts a specific policy in the face of vague statutory language.
Here's the thing: the Supreme Court ruled—unanimously!—against the government, which is exactly the outcome liberals feared. Without substantial good-faith scope to interpret enormously complex modern laws, the gears of government would grind to a halt.
So why are liberals content with losing this case? Because the ruling merely overturns the Medicare reimbursement policy and says nothing about the larger issue of deference to agency decisions.¹ This suggests that the Court—including conservatives as well as liberals—is not entirely on board with gutting the current rules on deference.
So what happens next? A unanimous decision written by a conservative suggests there's some horsetrading that needs to be worked out before a more expansive ruling is made. This in turn suggests that the current rules are likely to be pared back a bit, but the Court's members are still negotiating the exact terms. Or, perhaps, that the Court's conservatives have cold feet about upending the operation of the entire government and are willing to keep the current rules mostly in place but are trying to get something from liberals in return.
That's my guess, anyway. I suspect the current rules might get tweaked a bit, but are basically fairly safe. This is one of those cases (unlike, say, abortion) where the extremist conservative view just doesn't look so good, even to conservatives, when they have to really and truly consider the wild chaos that would result from a bright line ruling. The world looks different when you move from sloganeering to reality.
¹You'll hear the current rules referred to as "Chevron deference" because they were laid out in the 1984 case Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council.
IDK. This seems more like a "preferential deference".
Can somebody explain in 10-year-old language? NYT had a story yesterday saying Chevron deference was about to get tossed. Now I'm confused.
I can't do a good job, but basically their ruling ignored the Chevron precedent in this case. The result was a fairly narrow ruling, so no big effect, and the Chevron deference was not overturned. Though expect a lot more cases challenging it.
As I understand it, Chevron deference says that when a statute is ambiguous, courts should defer to the interpretation that a Federal agency places on the statute as long as the interpretation is reasonable. (The presumption here is that the agency is interpreting a statute covering an area where the agency in question has particular expertise--for example the EPA might be interpreting an environmental protection statute.)
In American Hospital Association v. Becerra, the Court ruled that the statute wasn't ambiguous, and thus Chevron deference wasn't applicable.
Thanks for the explanation. But then this decision doesn’t seem to telegraph anything about the sentiments of the justices on Chevron deference, does it?
I read from time to time that conservatives want to narrow or reverse Chevron deference, but to what end? It would be enormously disruptive, but eventually I would expect that Congress could just absorb the rule-writers into a vastly-expanded Congressional Research Service, the US Code would incorporate what is now the Code of Federal Regulations, and instead of bills being hundreds of pages that members of Congress wouldn’t have enough time to read, they would be tens of thousands of pages. Wouldn’t the workload of Federal judges, including the Supremes, actually increase? Do they want that?
The most right-wing conservatives want to do anything they can to tear down the current system. Congress can't get anything done now - if they had to do all the rule-writing for everything currently being enforced by agencies (think EPA), then government would largely grind to a halt. Victory!
Where can I see the poll that says that liberals are happy with the decision?