SCOTUS and Chevron The James Fallows tweet Digby cited about SCOTUS overturning the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine was an eye-opener. The SCOTUS decision hands highly technical decisions about regulations to courts. Fallows was so succinct and instructive that I’m reposting him here: A salesperson asked me on Tuesday what I did before retirement. I told him I reviewed the material stresses and reaction forces in high-temperature, high-pressure piping systems, pressure vessels, and rotating equipment for compliance with ASME codes (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) using finite element analysis. Which is why my cocktail party answer more often was, “I design factories.” In a more ironic mood, I’d reply, “Clients pay a lot of money to ignore what I tell them.” Do my job poorly and expensive equipment gets damaged and millions of dollars in production are lost. Do the job badly and people might die. Regulation decisions SCOTUS just put in the hands of judges are often conservative. Especially those regarding safety, like OSHA regulations. They are conservative for a reason, as Fallows points out. In one maintenance accident at a site I worked, 600 °F molten polymer spewed from an “empty” pipe onto a worker who’d just removed his “hot work” gear to repair a pump. After the goop cooled, they had to chip his body off the concrete floor with a jackhammer. I’ll admit I was relieved that it wasn’t any system I’d reviewed. I spent one fine morning at another site in a safety briefing on all the chemicals on … Continue reading Proving At Least Some Justice Is Blind