That's what you get when the Congress is too divided to pass laws, while the Supreme Court keeps telling the executive branch to stop inventing new interpretations of existing laws. If nobody is capable of setting national priorities, regulators just keep doing whatever they are doing.
Regulators can't even keep doing what they're doing, because what they were doing was publishing rules to resolve ambiguities in legislation, and now the Court system has preempted that privilege. Loper-Bright has turned the existing body of regulations into a target-rich environment. Every agency rule can be challenged, possibly overturned, applying retroactively.
Libertarians may cheer at this, but not so fast. The edge cases and particulars of laws aren't abolished, they're just fuzzy. You can't be sure you're complying with the law, even if the regulatory body says you're in the clear. You're at the mercy of judges who know nothing about the field they're ruling over. The chaos of legal uncertainty will grind the permitting of new technologies to a halt, as the regulators wait for Congress or the Courts to clarify how old laws apply to new circumstances before issuing any licenses.
Remember Oracle v. Google? How octogenarian Justices struggled to understand what an API was, when they could barely open their email? Imagine that, applied to the entire US code.
Remember Oracle v. Google? How octogenarian Justices struggled to understand what an API was, when they could barely open their email? Imagine that, applied to the entire US code.
It's basically this in a nutshell, except that far-right activists intend to use the same 3 justices in Texas to reinterpret all federal regulations.
