Does SCOTUS fit into this hypothetical?

One, quick example: You can have appointed experts who can be recalled by public input but never have to campaign for election. I'm writing this in short minutes with zero research so be assured there are countless possible systems that exist in the infinite space between the two binary options implied by your dilemma.

In other words, being elected to office is not the advantage of congress. The advantage we seek is public accountability. Public elections are a pretty fucking poor proxy for accountability though because we end up with single-issue voters acting out of rage and electing people who are specifically inept at their job.

Some people say "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" but this is even a level removed. This is a perfectly legal move that they've denied themselves for no material reason.

Not to mention that packing the courts could well be interpreted as an open attack against the separation of powers

With a populace that cares about ethics and morals, that would be a sensible strategy, but unfortunately about half the voting US population doesn't give a flying fuck about either any more.

Additionally, the danger for Democrats going for low blows and breaking tradition is that they might lose a significant part of their own voters as a result.

If you're referring to the justices, who are approved by those Congress members you don't trust, it is a dramatic stretch to assume they are the nation's best lawyers.

The requirements to practice law in the federal system are set by the judiciary itself. This dates back to England where getting "called to the bar" meant the judge giving you permission to go to a physical bar separating the spectators from the court.

It wouldn't make sense to mandate judges to be lawyers if they decide who is and isn't a lawyer. That would give the judicial branch control over their own appointments.

Because the laws are about particular things in the real world that have nothing to do with the legal system. They are frequently about scientific matters, for example. What constitutes a threat to public health? What constitutes pollution of a waterway?

When Congress authorizes an agency to maintain, say, clean drinking water, it entrusts scientific experts to determine, based on the most up-to-date evidence, what constitutes a pollutant that is harmful to human health. We do not need Congress to pass a new law every time we get new scientific evidence that a particular chemical (say, PFAS), is harmful.

The laws have nothing to do with the legal system? That's a new one.

Thats all people here want. Whatever power it is that you think that agencies should have, try to pass a law to do that first.

SCOTUS just decided that despite the madnates existing, being funded, and being regularly renewed, that's not good enough.

But they haven't defined how specific the mandate and laws must be. They can just, you know, keep shifting the goal posts until they get the desired result.

Then make a law saying that yes this is ok and good enough.

Problem solved.

The statutes regulating agencies are generally broad signposts, giving the agency a mission statement and a direction but leaving it a large latitude to implement it and decide on the details. That latitude has a legal implication since the agency is generally responsible for setting and enforcing standards.

The Chevron Deference is the legal doctrine that since congress delegated its power to the agency as matter and implementation experts, the agency's policy decisions should be deferred to so long as:

- it's legally ambiguous aka congress has not answered the precise issue themselves

- it is a permissible construction of the statute

The entire point of the chevron statute is that it's not up to the judicial branch to set government policy, and if a problem is a legal void then they have no authority, and unless and until congress makes a specific decision the agency does.

Take a look at the recent Murthy verdict and Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion.

The point is to avoid “experts”.

What I find funny is how the court is simply asking Congress to do their job - be clear in the intent of how laws should be executed. None of this "well, I'll leave it up to unelected bureaucrats to decide" and people think this is somehow a bad thing.

This is not *at all* related to what the Chevron defense is about.

"is a legal test for when U.S. federal courts must defer to a government agency's interpretation of a law or statute."

The idea Congress could pass a law "you can't pollute", and then a all of the legal details behind it aren't actually a part of the law, but rather "administrative decisions" by unelected state apparatus is a run-around of the system.

Congress can still pass such laws, and bureaucrats can create rules. The only difference is now the courts can overturn their interpretation.

How is that not a good thing?

Bureaucrats living in fear that the laws they pass might be held up to scrutiny?

That sounds like a good thing!

Is CO2 a pollutant? Who decides? Congress or scientists? Judges or scientists?

Now do that for every tiny detail of every part of every law.

It is computationally intractable to write laws specifying every possible scenario and exactly how an agency should act.

I don’t think you realize that these laws were passed with the understanding that agencies would fill in these gaps. Congress wanted these agencies to make these decisions at the time these laws creating said agencies were passed.

Good luck with this.

At least these corrupt politicians come to face the music every four years.

How do you figure? This ruling says that Congress must be domain experts in every area, and agencies must merely implement the specific policies that Congress dictates.

Is that even possible? For anyone? Sure, Congress is dysfunctional but so what? This new regime is unworkable, and it doesn't matter if it's dysfunctional politicians or "top lawyers".

It's actually constitutionally entirely reasonable to demand that lawmakers are the people who make law, because there's no specific reason to assume that the volume of laws should naturally drown the people responsible for them. But even if you do assume that, nothing in this judgement would restrict the volume of laws passed in any way. It's just not about that at all.

It all comes down to centralization vs decentralization. In a completely decentralized system you will never have an amazing outcome, because there will always be plenty of people doing stupid things - this includes judges. Yet you will also never have a horrible system, for basically the same reason - there will always be plenty of people doing 'smart' things. By contrast, centralized systems can yield a complete utopia under the oversight of socially motivated, intelligent, and highly capable leadership. Yet they can also yield the most unimaginably horrific dystopias under self centered, foolish, and incapable leadership.

So which does one prefer? In the end I suspect this is one of those issues where we all think other people think the same, but they most certainly do not. I personally could not imagine anything other than a system decentralized, to its greatest extremes, in every way imaginable. Because if I look at the political types of modern times "socially motivated, intelligent, and highly capable" are not generally the first words that come to mind.

I'm not going to get into debating this directly, but please be aware that arguments about the complexity of society are ideological in nature. It's not a simple factual matter on which there's widespread agreement. Many conservatives don't even agree with the premise that society has such a thing as complexity, or if it did that there's a higher level today than in the past.

It’s unworkable. And that is the goal.

It's no coincidence that Republicans simultaneously obstruct congress AND have a well-oiled machine to get their political allies on the bench. The playbook is like this:

- The Federalist Society establishes a pipeline of ideologically consistent judges. From law school to the supreme court.

- Congress blocks anything and everything on the legislative, so that any actual new change to the laws of the land come from new interpretations by the courts.

- This bloc in the lower courts works to bubble up good cases when they come, to get them before the higher courts.

- Every time there is a Republican in the executive, they appoint as many judges as they possibly can from this ideological bloc [1]. This ensures that a good case, when it comes, has a clear path from the bottom (local) courts to the top (supreme) court. The merits of appointees do not matter in the selection process - only a pledge of ideological fealty.

This project has been actively working for decades to change policy. There is nothing like this on the other side of the aisle. These are lifetime appointments. You cannot win on "good faith" against tactics like this. "Good faith" is insisting that the Judicial is "not political," it's not stepping down when it's politically opportune to do so.

[1] "At the 2018 Federalist Society gala, Orrin Hatch, the former Republican senator from Utah, declared, to the crowd’s delight, “Some have accused President Trump of outsourcing his judicial selection process to the Federalist Society. I say, ‘Damn right!’” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/trump-judges-fede...