| ▲ | jmyeet 3 hours ago | |
The Constitutional authority of the Supreme Court was rather vague. There are several areas where the court has what's called "original jurisdiction", the most notable of which is where a state is a party. So when states sue each other, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, meaning it directly hears those cases. The Constitutioin also established lifetime appointment and that the court interpreted constitutionality but didn't really specify what that means, which is actually pretty common for the Constitution. It's not that long of a document. It's up to Congress to establish a lot of the court's powers, the earliest part of which was the Judiciary Act of 1789. The court's ability to review state court decisions didn't come until the 20th century. A big change was Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review. The court granted itself this power. My point here is that the concentp of statutory interpretation is not a constitutional authority. And "major questions doctrine" is an issue of statutory interpretation. The origins of this came from a 2000 decision where the court used "common sense" (seriously) to determine what Congress intended [1]: > The doctrine was articulated as a paradigm in FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (2000), which advised "common sense" in assessing whether Congress intended to delegate broad regulatory powers As the court often does, it grants itself authority then later extends that authority so "common sense" under Rehnquist becamse "major questions doctrine" under Roberts: > It was applied in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014) and King v. Burwell (2015), with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority in the latter.[2] The Court first explicitly called it the "major questions doctrine" in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), where it held that agencies must point to "clear congressional authorization" for the power asserted in "extraordinary cases" The Roberts court then went on to use this subjective idea of "clear Congressional authorization" as strike down Covid mandates, student loan forgiveness, the power of the EPA and a bunch of other very political ends. Weird. And once again, none of this invokes any Constitutional protection or language at all. | ||