Today, the Supreme Court ruled to overrule the so-called Chevron deference in a 6-3 decision. The ruling is a HUGE victory for those who hate the power the massive bureaucratic state has amassed in recent decades.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded: "Chevron is overruled."
In the most basic terms, the Chevron deference (also called the Chevron doctrine) allows the courts, through a two-step process, to defer to "reasonable" administrative agency interpretations if a federal statute is unclear or ambiguous. It was/is essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card for presidents and agency hacks who liked to claim that a law says whatever they want it to say. It gave federal agencies broad authority to regulate everything from health care to immigration to women's sports to Covid jabs.
The principle derives its name from the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. which concerned disagreement over a change in the Environmental Protection Agency's interpretation of a permitting provision of the Clean Air Act of 1977. The case established a two-step review approach used by courts to analyze an agency's legal interpretations. Under the review process, courts consider (1) Congress' clear intent in passing a law and (2) (if the court finds ambiguities in the law) whether an agency's rule was reasonably construed and not arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.
The high court had consolidated two cases—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce—and heard oral arguments in January of this year.
Both cases concern the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) interpretation of a federal fishing law (George W. Bush's Magnuson-Stevens Act) requiring government monitors to accompany certain fishing boats. At issue: Who would pay for the monitors—the agency requiring them or the fishermen themselves? The statute is unclear on that point, and using the Chevron deference, the lower court ruled that the NMFS had the right to require the fishermen to pay for the $700-a-day monitors on trips that often last several days.
After losing at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs argued before the Supreme Court that the lower court's decision “perceives ambiguity in statutory silence, where the logical explanation for the statutory silence is that Congress did not intend to grant the agency such a dangerous and uncabined authority.” They added, "Whether by clarifying Chevron or overruling it, this Court should grant review and reverse the clear agency overreach at issue here."
Related: The Most Important Supreme Court Case in Years Could End Federal Regulation as We Know Them
Most of us learned in school (I hope!) that the judicial branch interprets the law. It's explained in both Marbury v. Madison and Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 78. The Chevron doctrine takes some of that power to interpret from the courts and hands it to unelected bureaucrats. The word "deference" in Chevron means that the court defers rulemaking to "experts" in the administrative state.
Carrie Campbell Severino wrote at National Review:
The Supreme Court itself has recognized in a line of cases that unelected bureaucrats should not decide major questions. Major or minor, the number of questions decided by agencies has proliferated over the course of generations. For more than a century, distrust of the electorate and the ceding of more and more power to the unelected—the phenomenon associated with the Progressive Era—was the dominant paradigm of governing. The vast bulk of the executive branch became insulated from elected officials without serious challenge, even as the everyday experience of citizens rendered the notion of the superior competence of government bureaucrats ridiculous.
When then-Judge Bret Kavanaugh was on the D.C. Circuit Court, he argued:
We must recognize how much Chevron invites an extremely aggressive executive branch philosophy of pushing the legal envelope (a philosophy that, I should note, seems present in the administrations of both political parties). After all, an executive branch decisionmaker might theorize, “If we can just convince a court that the statutory provision is ambiguous, then our interpretation of the statute should pass muster as reasonable. And we can achieve an important policy goal if our interpretation of the statute is accepted. And isn’t just about every statute ambiguous in some fashion or another? Let’s go for it.” Executive branch agencies often think they can take a particular action unless it is clearly forbidden.
Bureaucrats and lawyers will argue that striking down Chevron would send federal agencies into a tailspin and sideline the "experts" who are tasked with interpreting the 200,000+ pages of the Federal Register. The question they—and all of us—should be asking is why there are so many federal regulations. Fewer federal regulations would mean fewer federal bureaucrats lording it over regular Americans—those of us who can't afford to hire a team of lawyers whenever we change the oil in our cars or make healthcare decisions.
Yes, if Chevron "falls," there will likely be a blizzard of lawsuits that could paralyze the court systems. But the answer isn't to continue to empower the federal government. The answer is to reduce the size of government, reduce the size of the Federal Register, and disempower the "experts" who write all those rules. Maybe a Chevron blizzard—a crisis, if you will—could be the impetus Congress needs to roll back federal regulations and send issues back to state and local governments—or families—where they rightly belong. I'm not going to get my hopes up, but you never know.
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