Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Article from the Volokh Conspiracy (culture-war-adjacent, but IMO extremely funny):
Under the "major questions doctrine", if Congress delegates power to an administrative agency, but fails to explicitly describe the limits of that power, then it is to be presumed that the delegated power has implicit limits. If Congress wants to delegate a lot of power (such as the ability to forgive 400 billion dollars of student loans), then it must explicitly say so.
In a recent Supreme Court opinion, Justice Barrett used the following analogy to illustrate the doctrine: If a parent hands his credit card to the babysitter of his children and tells the babysitter to "make sure the kids have fun", then he implicitly is expecting the babysitter to do something minor like taking the children to a local ice-cream parlor or movie theater, and it would be a grave breach of the spirit of the instruction for the babysitter to do something major like taking his children to an out-of-town amusement park instead, even though technically that would not be a breach of the letter of the instruction.
The author of this article (a law professor) agrees completely with Barrett's analogy, and so does his father. However, according to a survey that some researchers conducted on this topic, only 8 percent of Americans agree with the analogy! The respondents rated a multi-day amusement-park trip at 92 percent for adherence to instructions and 4.7 out of 7 for reasonableness. In comparison, they rated the "correct" option of buying pizza and ice cream and renting a movie for home viewing at 100 percent for adherence to instructions and 6.8 out of 7 for reasonableness. This result may cast doubt on the linguistic justification that has been put forth for the major-questions doctrine.
I am not overly enamored of the way that article frames the research (and note that Josh Blackman is perhaps the least impressive of the regular contributors to the Volohk Conspiracy). The Volohk article says:
But, the cited research actually asked two questions: 1) whether the babysitter's actions violated the rule; and 2) whether the babysitter's action was reasonable. While only 8 percent of the respondents said that the actions violated the rule, the response to #2 was more equivocal; as you note, the " estimated marginal mean ratings of the action’s reasonableness" was 4.68 out of a scale of 1-7, where higher numbers = more reasonable. That still does not bode great for Barrett, but it not nearly as bad as the 8 percent figure implies.
And, note that Barrett herself makes a distinction between #1 and #2. She says:
So, she seems to more or less agree (or at least does not disagree) with the 92% who do not think that the babysitter violated the rule.
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