Old North Bridge National Park Service Photo Archives
250 years ago to the day, the simmering anger between the American colonists and
the British crown spilled into a shooting war. We don’t know whether the first
shots that day were fired on the Lexington green or at the Old North Bridge.
Wherever it was, that day marked a key moment on the path to independence.
As a child, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s father watched the events at the Old North
Bridge from his nearby home. In that same home, Emerson would later write:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
− Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”
My eighth great-grandfather Peter Crapo was one of those American farmers, living
in nearby Freetown, MA. He was too far away to have been at the Old North
Bridge, but records from that day document that he marched with Captain Levi
Rounsevell’s Company on “the alarm of April 19, 1775”.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts commemorates these events as Patriots’ Day. I
mark the day with gratitude for the sacrifices of my ancestors to secure the
blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I likewise honor all
who have served, and who serve today for the same noble cause.
I just added a new Guide describing how to add a GPS Receiver to your OpenBSD
NTP Server which
increases resiliance and ensures accurate time when internet connectivity is not
available.
There are 800,000 miles of cables the size of a garden hose that carry the world’s
international communications. Josh Dzieza writes a delightful long form piece
at The Verge about these cables and the ships that repair them:
The Cloud Under The Sea
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern
civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately
freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and
governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift
and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10
trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would
discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash.
As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable
security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial
services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and
logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced
accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark.
Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast
majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas
outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a
percent of the traffic.
Over the last 40 years, the Chevron doctrine has been cited as the legal
justification for a wide range of government agency regulation and rulemaking.
This precedent was created by a 1984 ruling of the Supreme Court in the
Chevron v. National Resources Defence Council
case. The Court ruled that courts should defer to a government agency’s interpretation
of the law as long as the interpretation is reasonable. If Congress has been ambiguous or silent, the agency’s reasonable reading should govern. Of crucial importantance, agencies
can do more than interpret overly broad Congressional lawmaking; they can
create new regulations never debated and approved by Congress as long as they
are “reasonable”. There are some limits to the deference courts must give,
but they are narrow in scope and too complex to enumerate here. Chevron has
become a pillar of administrative law and has been cited in more than 15,000
court cases.
This ruling has allowed for the broad expansion and proliferation of
regulations, rules, policies, and guidance that go far beyond what Congress has
authorized. For example, the Food and Drug Administration went from a
formal rule-making approach, to an informal rule-making approach which
skips the cumbersome public hearings, to issuing
non-binding guidelines1
which are very difficult or impossible to challenge in court and are therefore
effectivly legally binding:
After courts decided that the residual rulemaking authority in the
statute empowered the FDA to issue binding regulations on matters
not specifically covered by the formal rulemaking provision, the
agency began to utilize “notice-and-comment” procedures for the promulgation
of rules. The courts also, however, allowed interested parties to bring
pre-enforcement challenges to such rules. Although “informal”
rulemaking avoided the cumbersome hearings required with formal rulemaking,
searching judicial review on the merits and increasing procedural demands
added by all three branches of government have made it increasingly difficult.
As a result, the FDA and other agencies have experimented with further
shortcuts for issuing regulations.
As informal rulemaking became more difficult, the FDA shifted
from promulgating binding rules to issuing nonbinding guidelines.
For instance, rather than go to the trouble of amending its then
25-year-old regulations delineating “current” good manufacturing practices
(cGMPs) for drugs, the FDA decided to issue guidance for the
adoption of innovative quality control technologies by the pharmaceutical
industry. Similarly, even as prescription drug advertising has become increasingly
sophisticated, reflecting greater ingenuity and the emergence of brand new media
such as the Internet, the FDA has not revised regulations that it issued during
the 1960s, relying instead on various types of guidelines.
I am in favor of some of the regulations now in place because of Chevron. Most
of the developed world models their regulation of pharmaceuticals after the
United States Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA is undeniably the
world-wide gold standard in safety and efficacy.
However, I am vigorously opposed to the relentless sprawl of administrative
bureaucracy in government over the last 40 years, much of which has been
justified and enabled by Chevron. It gives agencies wide-ranging latitude
to interpret, expand, and elaborate on laws passed by Congress. It improperly
shifts the balance of power from the judicial and legislative branches to the
executive branch. It consolidates rule-making and rule-enforcement into an
unaccountable government agency. You can vote your Congressional representative
out of office. What can you do about those who work in the Office of Training
and Communications, Division of Communications Management, Drug Information
Branch, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug
Administration? Yes, that’s one of the official names for the people who issue
guidelines on drug advertising. There are at least two other offices and/or
centers within the FDA which may be part of issuing these guidelines. After a
couple hours of digging, I couldn’t be sure whether or how all these offices
worked together, or didn’t, to produce the advertising guidelines drug
manufacturers must abide by.
Yesterday, the justices on the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in
two cases which challege this long-standing principle of legal deference to
government agencies. Each case involves a fishing company challenging a National
Marine Fisheries Service requirement that herring boats cover the cost (approx
$700 per day) of government-approved observers aboard their vessels.
The court could chose to rule only on the specific fishing-related question in these
cases, but most court observers expect them to rule more broadly, and limit or even
possibly strike down Chevron deference.
Reporting for Bloomberg,
Jennifer A Dlouhy and Greg Stohr articulate both sides of the issue clearly:
“The idea of deference is a fundamental mechanism for all of the agencies to do their jobs,”
Green said during a discussion organized by the Center for American Progress and Democracy
Forward. “Agencies have more expertise, they are more specialized and they are more flexible
– so they can address new problems and crises that inevitably arise over time that Congress can’t foresee.”
True.
Philip Hamburger, founder of the conservative New Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court
should sweep away a fundamentally flawed doctrine that unfairly tilts legal proceedings. Chevron
compels “a systematic favoring of the most powerful party” in regulatory disputes – the very
agencies that wrote the rules – said Hamburger, whose group represents fishing industry clients
in one of the high court cases.
Also true.
I expect that the current court will do more than narrowly resolve the two fishing cases
that were heard today. If they do, it could be one of the most impactful rulings of the John
Roberts era.
Lars Noah, The Little Agency That Could (Act with Indifference to Constitutional and Statutory Strictures), 93 Cornell L. Rev. 901 (2008) ↩
The United States Supreme Court has yet to issue a ruling on whether someone accused of
a crime can be compelled to provide the passcode to their cell phone.
I believe the 5th Amendment protects cell phone passcodes, and defendents can refuse
to provide the passcode to their phone, even if law enforcement has a warrent for the contents
of the cell phone.