The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which said that courts had to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of the law when a statute was ambiguous, has prompted freak-outs from the environmentalist Left. It has also been characterized as being good for big business, notably by the supposedly neutral Associated Press, which said in its news article on the decision that the Supreme Court had delivered “a far-reaching and potentially lucrative victory to business interests.”
The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) highlighted two cases it is involved with where the end of the Chevron doctrine could finally get relief for small businesses and individuals. In view of the Loper Bright decision, the Supreme Court ordered that these two cases return to lower courts, which will now be free to interpret the law without being required to defer to the involved agencies’ interpretations.
In Foster v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Arlen Foster is a third-generation family farmer in South Dakota. His father planted trees on one side of his land in 1936 to help prevent soil erosion. In winter, snow drifts against the trees, and when the snow melts in spring, the water collects at a low point in his field before going away.
In 2011, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), an agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ruled that the puddle in Foster’s field is a wetland under federal law, which means farming it is illegal. The “wetland” in question:
That’s a puddle. But until Loper Bright, federal courts had to defer to the NRCS, which said it was a wetland and denied two requests for review from Foster.
The second case, KC Transport v. Secretary of Labor, involves a family-owned trucking company. In 2019, federal regulators showed up at the company’s facility in Emmett, W.Va. They must have been trucking regulators, right? No, they were mining regulators.
An inspector from the Mine Safety and Health Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor, cited KC Transport for repairing trucks without putting blocks around the wheels. Naturally, KC Transport contested the citation by pointing out that it is not a mine and therefore cannot be cited by a mine inspector. The Emmett property is neither on a mine nor attached to one, and the company’s trucks serve many industries, not just mining.
The administrative-law judge ruled against KC Transport, but the Federal Mine Safety Commission vacated the citations on appeal. End of story, right? Wrong: The secretary of labor appealed that ruling to the D.C. Circuit. The secretary argued that “even though the trucks being repaired were not hauling coal or driving on a haul road, just being parked at a repair shop makes both the trucks and the maintenance yard a ‘mine’ subject to federal regulation,” PLF says.
Before Loper Bright, the federal court had to defer to the agency’s interpretation, and it told the secretary of labor that the agency gets to define its own limits of what counts as a mine. Now, federal courts will be allowed to interpret the law and have the opportunity to get the Department of Labor off KC Transport’s back.
Someday in the future, we’ll look back and laugh at the nonsense that federal agencies were able to get away with under the Chevron doctrine. For now, the Supreme Court has finally allowed victims of regulatory overreach to get a fair appearance before a federal judge, who will no longer be compelled to rule against them. That’s not a victory for “business interests.” It’s a victory for common sense.