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.
As @Meriadoc says:
This doesn't pass the sniff test so badly, that you don't even have to think that the results can be interpreted straightforwardly. (Which is itself a metacommentary on the usefulness of straightforward readings of written facts. Do the authors comment on that?).
Go ask 5 friends in plain terms whether they think this is a reasonable use of the credit card in a way that you are sure they understand your straightforward intent of the question.
I know it's not quite independent, but for simplicity, if zero of them say it's reasonable, then the probability of that happening is 0.08^5 or .000003. Do you think it's that unlikely that 5 friends of yours would find this unreasonable? If not then you must concede that this question is clearly not actually producing a view of whether Americans find this reasonable.
So what is it telling us? Who the fuck knows. In cases like this, surveys without cognitive interviewing are less than garbage. Especially paid online surveys.
I can guarantee you that 92% of Americans don't find this reasonable in plain terms. If you want to pivot to an argument about some semantic interpretation where it's technically true, then look at that, you've made Justice Barrett's entire fucking meta point for her by showing how autistic readings of data out of context are often clear misinterpretations of they actually mean.
Are the authors of this study self-aware enough to reflect on that?
Drawing from your social contracts is not at all the same from randomly drawing from the general population. Just by polling people from here I'm certain I can create tons of impossibly unlikely results. (not that I disagree with your assessment that it's is implausible)
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100% agree with this analysis.
But I would say, that in my experience, adherence to "letter of the law" tends to be surprisingly anti-correlated with intelligence. By this I mean that lower IQ people tend to have an affinity for nitpicky rules lawyering.
This is just my feels though.
It's an easy way to exercise great power. You get to exercise your own judgement, pretending that your interpretation of the law is the law and has the law's authority.
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It sounds a lot like the "no vehicles in the park" quiz, which raises some interesting definition questions. When I've posed it to friends, I often get disagreement about whether she examples are violations, but also which violations are okay. Does the rule prohibit ambulances responding to emergencies? Even if it does, we should just allow the violation. "Not against the rules" and "against the rules, but an acceptable violation" are in practice rather equivalent.
The letter and actual implementation of the law can differ, for better or worse. Similarly, "you can use the credit card" is subject to some implicit reasonableness criteria, just like "no vehicles in the park".
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The article misrepresents the study, which does not say that 92 percent think it is reasonable. 92 pct say that it does not violate the rule. The assessment of reasonableness is different, as OP mentions.
The assessment of reasonableness is still quite high.
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