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.
It's funny, but I'm not sure the actual data is useful. Procedurally, the question was
They asked 500 online participants, who were paid 1 USD/hour, and ~475ish completed the questionaire in a useful way. Of those, the average answer was:
So, yes, Major scenarios were considered far less clearly unreasonable than the Misuse or Extreme scenarios. But they weren't considered as reasonable as simply ignoring the instruction entirely (even if this was considered a clearer violation of the rule), and even the most extremely unreasonable (live gator!) didn't actually get a score near 1 or count as a clear violation of the rule for more than 10% of the viewers. That's probably just a result of centrality bias and the experimental setup, but it leaves me pretty skeptical that this is a true meaning.
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