[gnu8]

I was wondering if the Supreme Court had legalized all drugs recently when they discovered that the executive branch agencies lack the power to create detailed regulations. Surely that would include the DEA’s power to schedule drugs, wouldn’t it?

[ceejayoz]

No; the ruling mostly moves adjudication of disputes over regulations from the administrative agency into the courts. From one set of unelected bureaucrats to another.

It's likely to result in a DDoS of the court system, but all existing regulations remain in effect until someone brings it to that one-judge jurisdiction in Texas with the judge that loves issuing nationwide injunctions.

It's darkly funny to me that the Court, in this power grab, managed to illustrate how insane this is probably going to get directly in the opinion; it repeatedly mixed up nitrogen oxides with nitrous oxide. https://newrepublic.com/article/183285/supreme-court-chevron...

[jcranmer]

> No; the ruling mostly moves adjudication of disputes over regulations from the administrative agency into the courts.

Not quite. Chevron deference (what was struck down) says that if the statute is ambiguous, courts are required to accept the agency's interpretation of the statute. In practice, striking down Chevron deference is unlikely to make much of a difference--it now means courts don't have to find a statute to be unambiguous to ignore the agency's interpretation, and many courts have already been willing to do that.

The bigger issue is that another case this term effectively guts the concept of statute of limitations for regulations, saying that the clock starts from when someone is injured by the regulation, even if the regulation predates their legal existence by decades. All you have to do to challenge a decades-old ruling is form a new corporation, congratulations, you are now newly injured by regulations that predate the founders' births. That's more likely to DDoS the court system.

[mywittyname]

>It's likely to result in a DDoS of the court system, but all existing regulations remain in effect until someone brings it to that one-judge jurisdiction in Texas with the judge that loves issuing nationwide injunctions.

But also SCOTUS shot down stare decisis, so another court at the same level can make the opposite ruling and that ruling also holds.

Someone is going to eventually take this ruling to it's logical conclusion: using "scientific mumbo-jumbo" to get a compound legalized/illegal. Hopefully it's something like, "SCOTUS bans all sales of all forms of dihydrogen monoxide", but there's the very real possibility of something far more sinister.