https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/28/politics/chevron-precedent-supreme-court
June, 2024. The Trump Court has overturned Chevron, upending years of consumer and environmental protections. Buyers, beware: drinking water, product safety, the air you breathe, the cars you drive, the food you eat, and the medicine and drugs you take will now be impacted, and your safety will be at risk. If Chevron was decided because of the argument that regulatory agencies were decided by unelected panels (while technically informed and educated), these complex science and technology questions would now be managed by both unelected and technically ignorant judges. Decisions based on science and evidence will be replaced by ill-equipped, uneducated, unelected, tenure-protected, and more partisan judges. The final word on these technical and scientific issues will end up in the Supreme Court's lap of uneducated or ignorant in any field except legal theory. (The Chevron decision text is a case in point. The Justice who wrote it did not know or catch the difference between laughing gas and air-polluting gas elements in the edit.)With the corruption, obvious extreme ideological bias, and ignorance of science and technology of a super majority infecting the current Court, reform and expansion are the only antidotes. This was a power grab by the Supreme Court that cannot go unanswered. Both consumers and the environment are being screwed.
The reason? Chevron's decision is what for-profit businesses have wished for for forty years. They can now play the system for their benefit using their financial resources, while consumers and environmentalists must rely on donations. So far as citizens and consumers are concerned? Our interests will be damaged by thousands of small, unkind cuts as case-by-case decisions and ignored. Our water, air, product safety, and protection from exploitation by financial services and banks will be lost in the gears of unelected, biased, and ignorant judges, ill-equipped to sort out technical issues. US contribution to global warming will increase.
While the ruling impacts clean air, this Chevron ruling can hobble any other agency like the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Safety Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Financial Consumer Protection Agency, and any other federal agency from issuing regulations to fill in the blanks left unaddressed in legislation after hearings and open processes. Instead, like abortion, it will fall into states and case by case lower court cases when clearly the issues cross state boundaries, leaving confusion and chaos. Most states have laws conforming to current federal consumer and environmental consumer laws, so enforcement and interpretation based on regulatory law at the federal level will be chaotic and subject to court challenges. It will also result in years and years of Congress writing legislation to revise or clarify current legislation. The final word on these technical and scientific issues will end up in the Supreme Court's lap: uneducated or experts. The reason? This is what for-profit businesses have wished for for forty years. They can now play the system for their benefit using their resources, while consumers and environmentalists must rely on donations. So far as citizens and consumers are concerned? Our interests will be screwed, and our water, air, product safety, and protection from exploitation by financial services and banks, will be lost in the gears of biased and ignorant judges, ill-equipped to sort out technical issues. US contribution to global warming will increase in the coming years. It is time to expand the court to permit one that reflects the interests of all citizens and is more balanced, not the decisions that favor one segment of the economy that goes unchecked. There should be staggered term limits so that they better reflect the more current public interest and concerns and advancements in technology and science.
There will now be a constant increase in cases brought by consumers, environmentalists, and businesses so that the court can handle these cases. Otherwise, the lower courts will be inundated by law suit remanded to them by a Supreme Court does not have the time or the capacity to handle given the increased volume. Even less educated justices in the lower courts will now handle technical decisions with more decisions based on ideological and partisan concerns.
It is also imperative that the ethical standards and enforcement of the Supreme Court of its members be implemented to protect us, the citizens, from the kind of hidden bribery we have witnessed and the overt partisan and ideological bent of the Court members, be exposed. The ability of regulatory agencies to make decisions based on science and expertise must be restored and that will only happen with a balanced Supreme Court,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference-power-of-federal-agencies/
A personal note: I have a history in Colorado advocating for consumers and clean air, from the NY Times May 13, 1979. I served as the director of the Denver District Attorneys section prosecuting consumer fraud and white-collar crime, and before that, active in grassroots organizations battling Denver's brown cloud. My interest in the ability of the federal government to deliver protection for consumers and the environment dates back to the birth of the legislation. I wrote a book, the Colorado Consumer Handbook, which focused on the new remedies these laws provided and solutions traditionally available to individuals. The key was the new empowerment of consumers and citizens whose health had been impacted by polluted water and air. These laws allowed them to get remedies in the face of well-funded, profit-oriented business interests. Now, the ability for any citizen to rely on these new laws has been crippled, tied up in knots in courts resolved only by those with deep pockets able to hire the army of lawyers and left to the decisions of judges not elected and uneducated in the science and technology involved. Facts and evidence will take a back seat to the judgment of the unelected, incapable of sorting out fact and technical arguments from fiction and spin. Four years after the mayor's race, I joined the administration of Federico Pena, a new, young mayor with views and goals similar to mine, and was able to put into action much of what I had proposed and supported. I served in his administration as both sub-cabinet and staff for his two terms.
DENVER, May 13 — Denver, still thought of as the mile‐high city with pristine air and mountain spring water, is sitting through a nonpartisan mayoral race that is largely focused on its “brown cloud” and its water supply, along with transportation and housing problems.
William J. McNichols, who says he is of the “realist” school of Democrats, has been Mayor for the past decade and is president of the United States Conference of Mayors. He is opposed in the Tuesday balloting by Felicia Muftic, executive director of the District Attorney's Consumer Protection Agency and an aggressive critic of City Hall on the questions of pollution and housing; Garry Mitchell, chairman of Gov. Richard D. Lamm's Tourism Council and president of Ski Country U.S.A., who brought to public attention in March a study that suggested a startling future fiscal stress for Denver; and Harold Sudmeyer, Denver coordinator for the United States Committee for Justice to Latin American Political Prisoners, who advocates the closing of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.
Pollution is the No. 1 issue in the mayoral race. With construction booming, new energy companies moving in and others expanding, Denver's smog is second only to that of Los Angeles, according to a rating by the Environmental Protection Agency, and there is concern about the growth's depleting the water supply.
Mayor McNichols notes that the construction in downtown Denver will generate $5 million in property taxes for the city. Stapleton Airport's passenger traffic is soaring; $4 million has been spent on the mass transit system. There is a new sports arena named for the Mayor, new fire department and police headquarters, new and modernized branch libraries, public parks and a lavish new Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Denver's unemployment rate in March was only 2.9 percent.
Note: I lost with about 43% of the vote, not enough to trigger a runoff. However, five years later, I joined the new Denver mayor Federico Pena's administration serving as Clerk and Recorder, and Mayor's liaison to City Council
Author: Colorado Consumer Handbook, author Felicia Muftic (Only known copy: Library of Congress; search Felicia Muftic
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