Supreme Court overturns Chevron decision, curtailing federal agencies' power in major shift

Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a landmark 40-year-old decision that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power, upending their authority to issue regulations unless Congress has spoken clearly.

The court split along ideological lines in the dispute, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority.

The court's ruling in a pair of related cases is a significant victory for the conservative legal movement, which has long aimed to unwind or weaken the 1984 decision in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. Critics of that landmark ruling, which involved a challenge to a regulation enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, have said the so-called Chevron doctrine gives unelected federal bureaucrats too much power in crafting regulations that touch on major areas of American life, such as the workplace, the environment and health care.

"Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires," Roberts wrote for the court.

The framework required courts to defer to an agency's interpretation of laws passed by Congress if it is reasonable. Calls for it to be overturned came from not only conservative legal scholars, but some of the justices themselves who have said courts are abdicating their responsibility to interpret the law.

The Supreme Court's reversal of the Chevron decision also further demonstrates the willingness of its six-justice conservative majority to jettison decades of past rulings. In June 2022, the court overturned Roe v. Wade, dismantling the constitutional right to abortion, and in June 2023, it ended affirmative action in higher education.

The challenge to Chevron deference
The dispute that led to the court's reevaluation of the Chevron doctrine stemmed from a 2020 federal regulation that required owners of vessels in the Atlantic herring fishery to pay for monitors while they're at sea.

These at-sea monitors, who collect data and oversee fishing operations, can cost more than $700 per day, according to court filings.

The National Marine Fisheries Service implemented the rule under a 1976 law, arguing that the measure allows it to require fishing vessels to cover the cost of the monitors. But companies that operate boats in New Jersey and Rhode Island challenged the regulation in two different federal courts, claiming the fisheries service lacked the authority to mandate industry-funded monitoring.

The federal government prevailed in both challenges, and the fishing companies asked the Supreme Court to step in and overrule Chevron.

The industry-monitored fishing program was suspended in April 2023 because of a lack of federal funding, and the fishermen were reimbursed for associated costs. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from one of the two Chevron cases before the court.

Concerns about a ruling
While the conservative legal movement decried the growth of the so-called administrative state, the Supreme Court's decision to reconsider the Chevron ruling sparked concerns that unwinding or even limiting the framework would threaten the ability of federal agencies to craft regulations on issues like the environment, nuclear energy or health care.

Proponents of the doctrine have argued that agencies have the expertise and experience to address gaps in the laws enacted by Congress, especially when it comes to administering programs that serve broad swaths of the population. Overturning Chevron would make it more difficult for the federal government to implement the laws passed by Congress, its backers warned.

The Biden administration urged the Supreme Court to leave Chevron deference intact, calling it a "bedrock principle of administrative law." Justice Department lawyers argued that the framework allows experts at federal agencies to interpret statutes, and have said they, not judges, are better suited to respond to ambiguities in a law.

Chevron doctrine has been applied by lower courts in thousands of cases. The Supreme Court itself has invoked the framework to uphold agencies' interpretations of statutes at least 70 times, but not since 2016.

The pair of disputes were among several others that the justices are deciding this term that involve the power of federal agencies. They also weighed the constitutionality of internal legal proceedings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which threatened to upend the work of administrative law judges in various federal agencies, as well as whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lacked the authority to outlaw bump stocks under a 1934 law that regulated machine guns.

The court ruled in a divided 6-3 decision that the ATF did go too far when it banned bump stocks, invalidating the rule put in place during the Trump administration.

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Fantastic!
Congress has been too lazy to properly write laws instead abdicating that power to various agencies to interpret as they see fit.

Most awesome news in the last 24 months

This going to put a kink in the BATFuckers agenda

Well done, Supremes!

Thank you again POTUS 45 for upgrading the staffing. That gift keeps on giving.

I’m no legal scholar, but I’m hearing this is the most important decision this century. No longer can bureaucrats make law. May The Constitution be ever stronger.

The ATF and other agencies can pound sand. No more 'rules'=law.

This is huge. Big loss for the unelected, unaccountable, permanent government bureaucracy.

This is painful to say, but the best example of how "administrative law" should work, is the tax code - which the IRS drafts, and Congress passes.

There's nothing wrong, TMK, with agencies drafting a model code, for Congress to adopt - and, really, that, along with inputs from affected industries, probably makes the most sense.

(TMK, things still "sorta" work this way - there's definitely a back and forth, at least between regulators and industry, about goals and the feasibility of various solutions.)

There's nothing in the USCON, TMK, which permits Congress to abdicate the drafting of legislation.

I haven't read the case yet, but I honestly think there's an excellent argument that "administrative law" is no law, at all.

quote:

Originally posted by CoolRich59:
This is huge. Big loss for the unelected, unaccountable, permanent government bureaucracy.

And what this means is that a huge number of them can now be fired since their jobs are no longer important. They don’t need analysts or drafters of new rules and regs.

Hopefully the federal register can be shrunk to one book a week.

You want a new law, get rid of 10 old ones.

As a person who has helped write five federal regulations, commented on dozens of proposed rules (all the way back to EPA’s Subpart S proposal in 1990), worked on Regulatory Impact Analyses and Cost Analyses, and who made a fair salary doing so, I cannot quite express my relief that Cheveron è morto.

Not that it will stop the regulatory state, but at least it seizes back one femptiota of a balance of powers.

More than once in my career, I've sat on the other side of the conference room table from an unelected federal bureaucrat who said, "the law is what I say it is!"

Hopefully, this ruling means that I never hear that bullshit from another unelected federal bureaucrat.

I'm really pleased to see SCOTUS holding firm to separation of power and unwinding some of the "tests" that were present in Roe and Chevron. I have no doubt the tests were well-intentioned, but allowing defective legislation to be "saved" by the courts removes any incentive for Congress to define laws or correct poorly drafted ones and invites interpretation into what SCOTUS /thinks/ Congress meant rather than relying on what Congress said.

quote:

Originally posted by CoolRich59:
This is huge.

Indeed. Perhaps even beyond huge. When the sting of FJB's abysmal debate performance wears off and the full impact of the Chevron reversal begins to sink in, there will be collective weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth the likes of which we have yet to witness from the leftist camp.

I doubt than many leftists can spell Chevron let alone understand what it did.

But I too want to watch them writhe in agony.

This should also force Congress to do its job. No more "You have to pass it to see what's in it" nonsense.

Chevron deference was politically expedient on both sides of the aisle because one could pass a weak or defective law and not have to stand accountable to the electorate. Instead, one would be able to say the Supreme Court did not allow for their particular interpretation of the law to move forward and claim that’s what the law was meant to say. This is very common at the state level. Using New Mexico, as an example, the governor declared a public health emergency related to firearms, which was immediately struck down as unconstitutional, but allowed her to say that she tried to take immediate action, and the courts refused to let her. Striking down, Chevron deference is a very neutral and balanced way to realign the process by which laws are made and enforced.

All excellent commentary above. It will not overturn the unconstitutional administrative state; but it is a huge and necessary--by no means sufficient--toward taking us to a constitutional republic, away from Wilsonian Progressivism with all its anti-American evil.

All hail Philip Hamburger, author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, the book that started this process; he is also founder of the National Civil Liberties Alliance that brought the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiff.

Amazon Link

Does this mean the EPA can fuck off and no longer make rules like “no more gas furnace sales, electric only from now on” and “cars must get 45 mpg”?

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
I haven't read the case yet, but I honestly think there's an excellent argument that "administrative law" is no law, at all.

No doubt in my mind that administrative law violates the 5th Amendment.

I was prosecuted by our Favorite Aviation Administration early in my airline career. They determined I had violated a couple of regulations and were demanding I surrender my certificate for 90 days. This would have been career ending. My other choice was to first agree I was in violation so that I could then appeal it! No choice of pleading innocence and them having to prove in court I had done something wrong.

I had to prove I did NOT do something. Guilty until I proved my innocence! Penalized without due process nor the ability to have a jury of my peers.

After spending 2 years of my before-tax pay on legal fees, upon appeal the administrative law judge (who was himself a former prosecutor for the FAA!) declared the case never should have been brought in the first place, and ordered the FAA expunge all record of the affair from my record. That's how shitty the prosecution was. The investigator was type rated in the aircraft and knew his scenario was technically impossible. In their complaint they actually proved me innocent (a max or min demonstrated characteristic is not a legal limitation). The prosecutor violated several parts of their handbook on how to prosecute a pilot. But I was at a non-union carrier and a soft target.

In the end it was still career limiting because on future job applications I had to answer yes I'd had a violation and prosecution even though overturned. This at a time when a speeding ticket would prevent getting a job. The difference in career earnings was very significant.

I was certainly deprived without due process. And my outcome was as good as anyone could have.

This a hugely significant ruling. It's going to take power away from the administrative agencies and require them to work with congress to pass actual laws if they want to regulate things. And congress, unlike the bureaucrats, is accountable to the electorate. Your vote just got even more important!