When a federal agency issues a new rule, you can sue them in federal court if you think the rule was wrongly approved. For example, maybe you think the agency violated proper procedure or failed to properly account for public comments. The default statute of limitations for filing a suit is six years. But six years from what? There are two possibilities:
- Six years from when the final rule was issued.
- Six years from whenever a plaintiff first suffers some injury from the rule.
The Supreme Court took up this question and handed down its decision yesterday. It mostly comes down to the wording of the law, which states that suits “shall be barred unless the complaint is filed within six years after the right of action first accrues.”
The majority opinion says this clearly means the statute of limitations begins when an injury has been suffered:
§2401(a)’s text focuses on a specific plaintiff: “the complaint is filed within six years after the right of action first accrues.”
The dissent says this clearly means exactly the opposite:
§2401(a) does not say that the clock starts when the plaintiff’s right of action first accrues; rather, §2401(a) starts the clock when “the right of action first accrues.”
Both sides agree that "the" is the operative word in this passage. However, the majority contrasts "the" with "a" while the dissent contrasts "the" with "the plaintiff." It is of such things that Supreme Court decisions are made.
Perhaps more to the point, however, is that for 75 years courts have routinely believed the statute of limitations for agency actions begins when the rule is issued. So why the sudden change? I think Ketanji Brown Jackson gets it right in the dissent:
Any established government regulation about any issue—say, workplace safety, toxic waste, or consumer protection—can now be attacked by any new regulated entity within six years of the entity’s formation. A brand new entity could pop up and challenge a regulation that is decades old; perhaps even one that is as old as the APA itself. No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season.
As in the case overturning Chevron deference, the conservative majority on the court is dedicated to any interpretation of the law that makes it easier to attack federal agency rules. Precedent doesn't matter; language doesn't matter; intent doesn't matter. They just want to weaken federal rulemaking and they'll do it any way they can.
Exactly so! All this careful word-parsing avoids the real issue, which is that they are turning everything over to the courts and turning the courts over to those who can afford to tie them up indefinitely.
And tie them up they will! The flood of lawsuits that is going to clog the courts, and in the process basically bring the rest of government to a halt (with the possible exception of certain expenditures corporations approve of, like military procurement). And this court is fine with that.
As noted previously, it's a recipe for chaos and self-destruction, and they don't seem to care. Après nous le déluge.
This is basic due process.
If I suggest an injury from a government regulation I have the right to sue. The fact that the regulation is 100 years old and 94 years ago other people who did not suffer my injury did not sue is irrelevant.
If SCOTUS today was liberal and you thought the most likely result would be more challenges to old regulations from the left you would be celebrating this ruling
False, false, and false. It's like a Trump speech: three major falsehoods in four sentences.
Please go away. Posts like this are tiresome.
I notice you are unable to respond coherently.
You are as bad as Joe Biden. Are you also senile?
MoFo's back, sucking Trump's and other rich gnomes' salty mushrooms as always.
Translation: You have no response.
Just another example…. That without bad faith… Republicans would have no arguments at all.
It’s time to crash the economy. Slow down then strike if trump wins. Stop buying junk.
I was thinking this, too. Europeans call general strikes for far less than what SCOTUS has foisted on us.
THIS!
end the epa!
i wanna build a reactor upwind from alito's house, a refinery next to clarence thomas, and hog lagoons next to mar a lago and trump's golf courses
+1
This Iowan wants to know: what's a hog lagoon?
Like Creature From the Black Lagoon, but much, much worse.
Many found in North Carolina, I believe, something that happens when huge numbers of porkers are concentrated in one place, especially a place with so-so natural drainage
It's an open air cesspool for hog excrement and blood. It's the primary way hog farms in NC deal with 10b annual gallons of "byproducts" from raising and slaughtering 9m pigs - it's not like they pour that stuff down a municipal sewer line. There are about 4,000 of these across eastern NC. They smell for miles away, and frequently flood into rivers and towns whenever there is a hurricane.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/11/north-carolina-hog-industry-lagoons-pipeline
Now they get to make the rules, and get the gratuities...or so it seems...
So many liberals are complaining the Supreme Court has let a future President Trump do anything he wants. It's not true. The Republican majority has certainly done everything it reasonably could to help Trump win in November, but it's also made a series of decisions which have hamstrung the powers of both the legislature and the executive.
The most powerful, influential branch of the US government today is the unelected, unaccountable federal judiciary.
And they seem determined to massively increase the work load on the court system, as if to purposely gum it up until it simply can't function at all.
So, what would it take for congress to rewrite the laws to make it more difficult for children on the Supreme Court to willfully misinterpret them?
It would be easier to just abolish the Supreme Court. As long as the Court exists, the potential for assholes to get into it who willfully will misconstrue anything written down and passed by Congress will exist.
The ultimate target of the Court conservatives is the FDA and its approval of abortion pills. Now plaintiffs have the right to sue to challenge the approval of the pill.
I think the court might have got this one right. The fact that a law or regulation is old doesn't mean that it is constitutional. Since one needs to have standing to file a challenge it is necessary to show that you are harmed. The fact that no one has shown harm before doesn't mean that harm isn't being done.
Lol. Because every new regulation needs to be rechallenged by anybody who has ever been harmed by it, over and over again for eternity. Tell me you're a naive nihilist without telling me you're a naive nihilist, JimFive. There is no regulation that causes no harm to somebody out there... but countries without enforceable regulations turn out to be real shitholes for everybody to live in.
Also... let me correct what you wrote for how it's going to work in real life:
Since one needs to have standing and significant sums of money to file a challenge it is necessary to show that you are harmed. The fact that no one rich enough to file a lawsuit and appeal it as high up as necessary has shown harm before doesn't mean that harm isn't being done to our wealthy and corporate overlords.
Because don't kid yourself: there will still be plenty of people that you are deeply concern-trolled about who will be newly harmed in the future by old regulations that have sat on the books for decades. They just won't matter at all, because they won't have enough time and money (or luck to get a wealthy, corporate or advocacy group sponsor) to appeal it all the way to the circuit and/or Supreme Court.
Business really hates regulations but they also hate lawyers. Trading the fire for the pot. Wonder how the decision will work; to the advantage or disadvantage for businesses.
For better or worse, the US doesn't have a history of forming most regulations purely for the benefit of society at large. Most regulations were partially or entirely written by lobbyists, so someone out there benefits from them in their current form, even if others out there are hurt by them. So I imagine there will just be lots more warfare in the courts between Wealthy Person/Corporation/Consortium A and Wealthy Person/Corporation/Consortium B over whether a regulation that currently benefits B more than A right now should be struck down to benefit A more than B instead.
Let's take a regulation from Obamacare as an illustration: Insurance companies hate having to insure sick people. Hospitals love that sick people now are more likely to have insurance, so that their bills are actually paid. So a newly-formed insurance company challenges the regulations requiring policies to be offered to all people regardless of medical history. Who should win, the well-heeled insurance company and its older allies who would love to see the regulation dropped, or the well-heeled hospital consortium who knows that it's life-or-death financially for some of them that people have insurance before they walk in the door with an expensive problem?
In other words, the rich are going to start warring even more amongst themselves, with the rest of us being lucky enough to get shat on along the way the whole time.
Who should win, the well-heeled insurance company and its older allies who would love to see the regulation dropped, or the well-heeled hospital consortium who knows that it's life-or-death financially for some of them that people have insurance before they walk in the door with an expensive problem?
The lawyers.
Think he got new wheels for his mobile home from Leo? Sammy, Gory… what did you get? Brewskies boys, feels like spring-time for Drumpf!!