Thursday, June 13, 2024

You can't vote a fact out of office

What's at stake in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce?

(Update: The ruling was made June 28, and it "upended what’s called the 'Chevron doctrine,' a long-standing legal principle that gave federal agencies broad discretion to interpret the instructions Congress hands them for writing rules and regulations." &mdash, Jonathan Cohn, HuffPost) Media Matters published this headline: "Project 2025 partners join right-wing media and climate deniers to celebrate SCOTUS decision overturning Chevron deference."

Carrie Campbell Severino says in the conservative National Review yesterday that "agency expertise" is unnecessarily "cherished." So-called experts who work in government agencies are unelected and are little more than "bureaucrats," as she'd have it.

Chevron and the Myth of Agency Expertise Should Be Put to Rest. By CARRIE CAMPBELL SEVERINO June 12, 2024. First paragraph of this National Review article: As we await the Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, where the justices have been asked to overturn or substantially narrow the application of Chevron deference to judicial review of agency rules, expect a lot of howling about the impending defeat of cherished agency expertise. This sentiment is especially pronounced from special interests who thrive off the work of bureaucrats who enjoy substantial isolation from democratic accountability. Earthjustice is a fan of Chevron deference because it “allows for expertise to craft effective policies.” The AFL-CIO, a strong defender of Chevron, touts “the expertise within agencies that have been given authority to ensure public health, safety and financial security as well as many other critical jobs.” Some of us actually look to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected bureaucrats, to do that.

But consider: Experts know things. They are experts in something. They can find facts, analyze them and turn them into information, and communicate them to us.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a June 11 article calls this "a rejection of democratic accountability in favor of the administrative state."

The Supreme Court itself has recognized in a line of cases that unelected bureaucrats should not decide major questions. Major or minor, the number of questions decided by agencies has proliferated over the course of generations. For more than a century, distrust of the electorate and the ceding of more and more power to the unelected—the phenomenon associated with the Progressive Era—was the dominant paradigm of governing. The vast bulk of the executive branch became insulated from elected officials without serious challenge, even as the everyday experience of citizens rendered the notion of the superior competence of government bureaucrats ridiculous. More recently, the battle lines have been drawn as conservatives recognized the problem with a system that had departed from the structural Constitution of the Founders. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell notes in today’s Wall Street Journal, liberals’ ongoing faith in unelected bureaucrats “might come from a good-faith trust in ‘experts,’ or a sincere belief that sound policy is too valuable to risk in elections. But at its core, it is a rejection of democratic accountability in favor of the administrative state.”

Source:

Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy The administrative state thwarts the Constitution’s structure for keeping officials accountable. Mitch McConnell, WSJ, June 11, 2024

Yes, that's the point. Facts are not democratically accountable. You can't vote a fact out of office, and you shouldn't try. "Unelected" is not a synonym for "bad."

If the government does not have anyone with expertise in what the facts are, the government is full of people who are popular and who do not necessarily know anything, and thus cannot be held to account.

Republicans object to employing any government knowledge-workers who aren't on their team and can't be pressured at the ballot box to conform to their team. What they're pulling here is a power play.

Similarly

Some of Trump's supporters

"assert that there is too much separation of powers—that the Constitution doesn’t authorize the cabinet departments and the federal bureaucracy to defy the president as a sort of “fourth branch of government.” He’s elected and they’re not. The story is more complex than that: in many cases Congress deliberately set up semi-independent agencies, and the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled them unconstitutional. (The Court upheld the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of Republicans’ least favorite agencies, just a few weeks ago.) Some of these entities are pretty important: the Federal Reserve comes to mind. But it’s true that many presidents grow frustrated by the power of the bureaucracy."
Separation anxiety: A week of news illuminates, and tests, the separation of powers. Steve Inskeep, June 15, 2024

See here

Importing this @volts.wtf thread from the bad place. It opens with a link to a piece that used official data to establish that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. But here’s the thing, Project 2025’s Trump 2.0 promises to destroy that world in which we can “know” things like this.

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— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) Jun 27, 2024 at 7:57 AM

See:

"But the 'key part' and 'most important' for Americans 'to understand [about Project 2025] is this reshaping of the federal government,' she [Griffin] said.

'I saw the actual executive order at the end of the last administration, ready to go, that would remake every civil servant into a political appointee and a loyalist to Trump,' recalled Griffin, an apparent reference to Trump’s Schedule F plan, which he has vowed to reinstitute if he wins back the White House.

— Ex-Donald Trump Aide Names ‘Most Important’ Part Of Project 2025: It’s the “key part” that’s ready to go, warned Alyssa Farah Griffin. Lee Moran, HuffPost, Jul 12, 2024

Also

I keep on thinking about how John Roberts messed up nitrogen oxide with nitrous oxide in a ruling on how the courts were better suited to provide expertise than experts.

— Molly Shah (@mommunism.bsky.social) Jun 30, 2024 at 4:36 AM

Sometimes certain people feel it's unfair to debate certain other people who are going to win the debate

I had to double-check that this was the real New York Times headline for the story about his appearance on Hannity. It is.

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) Sep 4, 2024 at 9:49 PM

More knowledge

I've written:

Expertise is knowing how to survive

The living cathedral of knowledge

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