Centerville, Calif. Apr. 1942. Young workers of Japanese ancestry picking peas on a farm in Alameda county, before evacuation and, later, housing for the duration of the war, in War Relocation Authority centers
#Centerville #Calif #Japanese #Alamedacounty #California #JapaneseAmerican #WorldWarII #UnitedStates #DorotheaLange #Loper #American #JapaneseAmericans #OperationT-1057342 #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange
A federal appeals court
struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark
#net #neutrality rules on Thursday,
ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the 
F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content.
In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as #Loper #Bright, 
that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations.
“Applying Loper Bright means we can end the F.C.C.’s vacillations,” the court ruled.
The court’s decision put an end to the Biden administration’s hallmark tech policy, which had drawn impassioned support from consumer groups and tech giants like Google and fierce protests from telecommunications giants like Comcast and AT&T.
The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations,
which expand government oversight of broadband providers
and aim to protect consumer access to the internet.
The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration
and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. 
The rules were repealed under President-elect Donald J. Trump in his first administration, but they continued to be a contentious partisan issue that pit tech giants against broadband providers.
In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court decisions have undercut federal agencies’ ability to curb pollution and fight climate change.
Several cases decided in 2024 continued this trend,
systematically shifting the power to make and enforce environmental regulations over to the judicial branch.
Though it will likely take years to know the full consequences of this year’s rulings,
legal experts say they have profound implications as to how federal agencies can respond to the threat of climate change.
Congress passed the majority of the laws that protect our lands and waters decades ago,
and with an increasingly polarized political environment, legislators have passed few new environmental regulations since.
In the past few decades, Congress has in effect tasked federal agencies with adapting existing laws to our new climate reality,
said Chris Winter, executive director of the University of Colorado Law School’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment.
But with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court in place, these laws have come under increased scrutiny,
including in several of the court’s 2024 landmark decisions.
Perhaps the most significant was #Loper #Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,
which overturned the 1984 #Chevron #doctrine, a powerful legal tool that gave federal agencies the ability to interpret and enforce ambiguous or unclear laws.
For decades, the courts have largely deferred to agency experts in crafting and enforcing regulations,
since those agencies typically have greater expertise in their subject areas than judges do.
By eliminating Chevron, the court transferred the authority to clarify the meaning of a written law to the judicial system.
Loper Bright has already raised “a lot of uncertainty” about whether or how agencies should create and enforce environmental regulations,
according to Winter.
The last few years have signaled a structural change in the balance of power between courts and federal agencies, he said,
with courts now working hard to rein in federal regulators.
Meanwhile, industry groups eager to roll back regulations have filed lawsuits in conservative states with business-friendly judges.
In federal courts in Wyoming, Utah and Montana, for example,
groups representing farmers, ranchers and the fossil fuel industry have cited Loper Bright as a precedent for suing the Biden administration to overturn the 2024 #Public #Lands #Rule,
which designated conservation as a legitimate “use” for public lands in line with extractive uses like mining, grazing and logging.
As of Sept. 6, Loper Bright has been cited in 110 federal cases, according to the advocacy group Democracy Forward.
“These days, it doesn’t feel like you can really think deeply about the law. It is simply a political battle,”
said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center,
a nonprofit public-interest environmental law firm.
Altogether, the body of law emerging from the court has “prioritized politically oriented property rights and economic rights,”
Schlenker-Goodrich said.
“In other words, corporate rights and corporate power.”
if you want to know the biggest difference between 2019 and now, I would urge you to consider the dark shadow that hangs over everything -- the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s decision in #Loper #Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
That ruling, which overturned the doctrine called “#Chevron #deference,” 
puts the future of any policy that Harris favors in grave doubt. If you want the Harris campaign to get more detailed on policy, I’m sorry to say that any conversation starts and ends with 
how they plan to confront a Supreme Court that has torched the separation of powers 
in the mad game of Calvinball they kicked off during the Trump era.
https://newrepublic.com/post/185462/harris-policy-supreme-court-chevron
“#Loper Bright is a case seeking to restore one of the core tenets of our democracy: that Congress, not the administrative agency, makes the laws,” the #Koch network spokesperson said.
(#Chevron never said that #congress did not make the #laws. It only says that the #agencies design #regulations to implement the laws that Congress makes.)
Several months later, #SCOTUS announced it would take up a case, #Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which #Koch network staff attorneys represent the plaintiffs. If #Thomas & his colleagues side w/them this coming term, #Chevron will be overturned once & for all.
W/o Chevron, “any place you would need #regulation to address a pressing #social problem, it’s going to be more costly to get it, harder to implement it & it’s not going to go as far,” said Noah Rosenblum, a prof at NYU #Law.
