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 site that might kill you. You always looked to the wind socks on the towers to see which way the wind was blowing so you could run in the other direction if the site evacuation siren went off. But here they warned that if you were up in the production structure when the siren went off and saw a green cloud below, “Don’t go down into the green cloud.” The end product was nontoxic powder used in paint pigment. It’s the “M” on your M&Ms.
ASME codes are private. But violate them at your legal peril. Or maybe not. SCOTUS just handed judges the authority to decide if government regulations saying you ought to comply with them are too restrictive. You know, because allowing government experts to interpret regulations they are tasked with administering is “fundamentally misguided,” says Chief Justice John Roberts. Ask him what he knows about finite element analysis.
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