Short version: They killed it because of "Loper Bright" which killed the Chevron Deference.
In other words: Until recently, US executive agencies were given a lot of leeway in creating regulations that align with their mandate from Congress. This leeway was struck down by the Roberts Supreme Court, insisting that courts can reign in executive agencies and keep them from operating with a broad mandate.
This court doesn't say Net Neutrality is bad or unconstitutional. It says that, under the new precedent set by the Roberts Supreme Court, the FCC does not have the authority it claims to have in regulating ISPs in the same way as a phone company.
If Congress were to pass a law that said the FCC had the authority, or that net neutrality should be instated explicitly, it would happen.
Has there been another Supreme Court that has overturned as many precedents than the Roberts court? It looks to me that this court will have a huge impact far into the future.
They are less activist when it comes to ethics rules though. The Clarence Thomas situation is ridiculous.
>> Has there been another Supreme Court that has overturned as many precedents than the Roberts court?
Yes, every modern Supreme Court (1950's and on) has overturned not just as many, but more, precedents than the Roberts court.
"The famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 overruled an average of 3.1 precedents per term. The number ticked up slightly as the court moved to the right under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who led the court from 1969 to 1986, to 3.4 precedents per term. It dropped under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who led the court from 1986 to 2005, to 2.4 precedents per term.
Through the end of the term that ended in June, the Roberts court has overruled precedents at the lowest rate, at 1.6 per term. But it has picked up the pace since the arrival in 2017 of the first of three justices appointed by President Donald J. Trump. Since then, the rate has been 2.2 precedents per term, still the lowest of the four courts."
Perhaps the fact that the courts referenced in that article are 40-60 years in the past, so anyone under age 50 would have the personal experience of seeing the Roberts court as exceptional.
edit 45 minutes after posting: Also, more opinionated, the Roberts court's reasons for their decisions are often pretty wild and many of their decisions have been a detriment to the country. My pet cases to loathe are Citizens United and Rucho v. Common Cause.
The Roberts court is actually the least "activist" in modern history. His whole philosophy is all about maintaining precedent (obviously sometimes he can't get his way--which seems to be what happened in Dobbs, for instance).
Bullshit. Overturning decades old decisions is activism, plain and simple. He's taking a steaming dump all over the very idea of precedent and star decisis, it sure as hell isn't his philosophy to maintain it. If it was then Roe v. Wade would never have been overturned.
Steelmanning the decision to overturn Roe there's two factors.
* The belief that Roe was illegitimate from the beginning and that Right to Privacy was invented by the courts out of nothing.
* Changing prevailing sentiment on the issue in a manner not dissimilar to the position they were in during Civil Rights. Meaning if left to stand the existing rulings would have impeded progress the country clearly wanted to make. This was one of the justifications for Roe in the first place.
I think it's not hard to see blue states as acting very much like southern states did during the period the tide turned. This of course requires being neutral on abortion but I think it's not inaccurate to say that "an obvious wrong and evil" is how pro-life people view the issue.
But yes, that's all part of the plan. rely on the dysfunction of congress and the end of Chevron to impart a deadlock that lets private corporations run free. All while dismantling whatever other regulations they can get away with.
The idealist in me also hates the idea of unelected "government experts" having a wide berth to do whatever they think is best since I know that 50% of the time they'll be appointed by / taking orders from [Insert part(ies) I don't like] and thus they'll be against my interests.
But the pragmatist in me still winces at all the stupidity that happens in the real world because Congress hasn't passed many useful laws in 25 years. Most ideas are put into place by executive fiat because we only have two functioning branches of government now. (Yes, I agree that it's still better than just having one!)
You should set aside an hour or two and research how the administrative state actually works. These agencies aren't full of political appointees, rather they're staffed with engineers and scientists who are dedicated to keeping our water potable, food safe, weather tracked, air travel safe, etc.
It's literally not possible for the unelected lobbyists who write bills for Congress to write imperative-style laws. Even if they could manage to promptly draft and pass updates to laws as infrastructure, tech, the situation, etc evolve, it wouldn't be able to get the information needed to provide coherent instructions, and it would hamstring implementation forever. It's obviously much better for Congress to write in a declarative style, e.g. "1251.A.3. It is the national policy that the discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts be
prohibited;" [0]. Clearly an important goal, but absolutely impossible for Congress and its unelected lobbyists to write out executable instructions for achieving this (also, Congress regularly explicitly delegates implementation to actual experts via clauses like this "1251.d. Except as otherwise expressly provided in this chapter, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (hereinafter in this chapter called ‘‘Administrator’’) shall administer this chapter."[0])
Just listen to the oral argument in the recent San Francisco vs EPA Supreme Court case [1] (or review the transcript [2], or get the summary from Oyez [3]). During heavy rains, San Francisco's city govt dumps a lot of effluent into the Pacific ocean. The EPA requires they get a permit, track the amount of effluent, work to remediate the issue, and develop a Combined Sewer Overflow control plan. The EPA wants to help, but San Francisco has failed for decades to provide adequate information about their sewage system to the EPA to enable the EPA to help develop said control plan (e.g. pg 98 of the transcript).
There's just no way Congress's unelected lobbyists could hope to write imperative laws. The experts staffing the administrative state aren't receiving partisan orders from the Democrats to harass San Francisco. Republicans don't issue partisan orders to agencies either (the Republicans just throw sand into the machine by tying up agency experts in frivolous lawsuits).
But in any case, it's the agency experts and their hundreds of thousands of years of knowledge and experience who keep America running.
In other words: Until recently, US executive agencies were given a lot of leeway in creating regulations that align with their mandate from Congress. This leeway was struck down by the Roberts Supreme Court, insisting that courts can reign in executive agencies and keep them from operating with a broad mandate.
This court doesn't say Net Neutrality is bad or unconstitutional. It says that, under the new precedent set by the Roberts Supreme Court, the FCC does not have the authority it claims to have in regulating ISPs in the same way as a phone company.
If Congress were to pass a law that said the FCC had the authority, or that net neutrality should be instated explicitly, it would happen.