[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

For decades, unaccountable federal bureaucrats have exerted extraordinary owers over the day-to-day lives of the American people, including in such areas as healthcare, taxes, the workplace, housing, and the environment. This disturbing trend was exacerbated by a noxious Supreme Court precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine under which the courts were often required to defer to a regulatory agency’s  interpretation of the statutes the agency was responsible for administering.

It made no difference if a reviewing court exercising its own independent judgment would have reached a different conclusion in its interpretation of a statute than the regulatory agency. The agency’s interpretation was what counted as long as it was “based on a permissible construction of the statute” – a vague standard that has allowed regulatory agencies wide latitude to act like quasi-courts.

No more. The misguided Chevron Doctrine has now been relegated to the dustbin of history. On June 28th, the Supreme Court announced its decision, by a 6-3 vote, that the regulatory agencies had been allowed to go too far in assuming the role that the Constitution assigns to the judicial branch of the federal government. The Supreme Court’s ruling returned the power to the courts to “say what the law is,” the words used by the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall in the landmark 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison to describe the judiciary’s function of judicial review. That is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they established the judiciary as the third independent branch of government.

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion concluded that the Chevron Doctrine violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s grant of authority to the federal courts to “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the Court’s majority opinion, wrote that:

“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption [of court deference to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws] is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion emphasized the broader implications of overruling the Chevron Doctrine. “In doing so,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “the Court returns judges to interpretative rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding.”

This does not mean that each agency’s viewpoint on issues within its area of expertise will be ignored by the courts going forward. The agency’s opinions will be respected if they are persuasive, considering such factors as how close the agency’s initial interpretation is to the enactment of the statute at issue and the agency’s consistency in applying this interpretation thereafter. One problem with the Chevron Doctrine, Chief Justice Roberts explained, was that it  “allows agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.”

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by her fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she predicted that the majority ruling “will cause a massive shock to the legal system.”

Hopefully, Justice Kagan will turn out to be right but not for the reasons she gives for defending the hugely expanded administrative state. For too long, the system of checks and balances and separation of powers designed by the Constitution’s Framers has been distorted beyond recognition, giving way to rule by unaccountable know-it-all technocrats.

The legal system needed the “massive” shock delivered by the Supreme Court to restore the checks and balances and separation of powers that are integral to America’s constitutional republic.