I’m always amazed how willing the courts are to block actions like this on vague technicalities but are then so deferent to police violations of civil liberties where even a violation can still upholds the original judgement against that person and only applies going forward.
This is not a vague technicality, though? The FTC has to obey the law, and the law says that if they make a new rule that has more than $100M of direct monetary impact, they have to use a more involved process. They originally tried to waive this by saying that the rule doesn't have more than $100M impact, but that's just clearly false.
It's not a good thing to cheer rules being broken when you like the reason.
You never hear about the millions of perfectly reasonable rulings every year.
The stuff based on vague technicalities that result in something you agree with isn’t memorable, so it’s the vague technicalities you disagree with that’s memorable.
The process is broken. If there was an issue with no alternatives being specified, the right time to bring that up was during the public comment period when there weren’t any alternatives. Not after, imo.
I get that process needs to be followed but this is allowing unnecessary gamesmanship.
It was brought up, by the FTC members who voted against it, precisely because it didn’t follow the process. But the democrats had the majority so it passed anyway. And then was immediately sued for failing to follow the process.