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

By Melissa Quinn

Updated on: June 28, 2024 / 4:34 PM EDT / CBS News

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.Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson were in dissent. Kagan read portions of her dissent from the bench.

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 chief justice called the earlier decision a "judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties."

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.

"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law," Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. "As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country's administrative czar."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the Supreme Court's decision as "deeply troubling" and said in a statement that it undermines the ability of agencies to employ their expertise.

"Republican-backed special interests have repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court to block common-sense rules that keep us safe, protect our health and environment, safeguard our financial system, and support American consumers and workers," she said. "And once again, the Supreme Court has decided in the favor of special interests, just as it did when they sought to gut long-standing protections for clean water, thwart efforts to respond to a global pandemic, and block the cancelation of crippling student debt for tens of millions of Americans."

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. Jackson recused herself from one of the two Chevron cases before the court.

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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.

Kagan, in dissent, accused the conservative majority of usurping the power the legislative branch gave to agencies to make policy decisions and putting judges in the center of the administrative process on all manner of subjects.

"What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the nation's health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.?" she wrote. "In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role."

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.

Roberts wrote for the court that its decision reversing Chevron would not call those questions those prior cases. But with Chevron overruled, Kagan warned of new legal challenges to longstanding agency interpretations that had never previously been targeted.

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.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference-power-of-federal-agencies/

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Supreme Court overturns 1984 Chevron precedent, curbing power of federal government

By John Fritze, CNN

3 minute read

Updated 2:55 PM EDT, Fri June 28, 2024

CNN —

The Supreme Court on Friday significantly weakened the power of federal agencies to approve regulations in a major decision that could have sweeping implications for the environment, public health and the workplace.

The 6-3 ruling, overturning a precedent from 1984, will shift the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches and hands an important victory to conservatives who have sought for years to rein in the regulatory authority of the “administrative state.”

The lawsuits were filed by two groups of herring fishermen challenging a Commerce Department regulation requiring them to pay the salaries of government observers who board their vessels to monitor the catch. But the decision will net a far wider swath of federal regulations affecting many facets of American life.

The decision overturns the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council precedent that required courts to give deference to federal agencies when creating regulations based on an ambiguous law. Congress routinely enacts open-ended laws that give latitude to agencies to work out — and adjust — the details to new circumstances.

Supreme Court Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Related article Oral dissents are back in vogue at the Supreme Court as liberals lament latest rulings

“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the son of a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, wrote separately to call Chevron Deference “a grave anomaly when viewed against the sweep of historic judicial practice.”

The 1984 decision, he said, “undermines core rule-of-law values ranging from the promise of fair notice to the promise of a fair hearing,” adding that it “operated to undermine rather than advance reliance interests, often to the detriment of ordinary Americans.”

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Liberals say ruling is ‘judicial hubris’

Justice Elena Kagan, writing a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberals said that, with the overturning of Chevron, “a rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.”

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar,” Kagan wrote.

The majority, she added, “disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the outcome as “yet another deeply troubling decision that takes our country backwards.”

Jean-Pierre said that “Republican-backed special interests have repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court” and that “once again, the Supreme Court has decided in the favor of special interests.”

Conservatives have long sought to rein in regulatory authority, arguing that Washington has too much control over American industry and individual lives. The justices have been incrementally diminishing federal power for years, but the new case gave the court an opportunity to take a much broader stride.

In the case of the fishermen who brought the case, the law allowed the government to mandate the observers but was silent on the question of who had to pay their salaries, which the fisherman argue added roughly $700 a day to their costs. They encouraged the court to rule that agencies couldn’t enact such a requirement without explicit approval from Congress.

The Supreme Court had been trending in that direction for years, knocking back attempts by federal agencies in other contexts to approve regulations on their own. In 2021, for instance, the court’s conservatives struck down a Biden administration effort to extend an eviction moratorium first approved during the Trump administration. Last year, the court’s conservatives similarly invalidated a Biden plan to wipe out student loans of millions of Americans.

This story has been updated with additional details.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/28/politics/chevron-precedent-supreme-court/index.html

>>21111715 Watching the water: Atlantic Herring Fishery drowns unelected officials via the Chevron Doctrine, returning power to the people…

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Chevron Doctrine

This doctrine, formerly known only to specialists, will play a large role under Trump.

During the Gorsuch nomination, there was a lot of talk in the press about the Chevron doctrine. Most people have never heard of this doctrine, and only a few are aware of all the nuances. As the Trump Administration’s rulemaking efforts come before the courts, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it. As the Court’s 2017 Term gets underway, I thought this would be a good time to give a roadmap to the doctrine.in fact, we’ve already seen a short opinion from Justice Gorsuch questioning the application of the doctrine.

The Chevron doctrine is a rule about court review of agency actions that many scholars consider central to modern administrative law. That doctrine calls for judges to accept reasonable interpretations of a statute by an administrative agency, even if the judges might have favored different interpretation themselves. The Supreme Court has cited two reasons to give agencies the power to interpret ambiguous statutes: (1) agencies are more democratically accountable than courts, and (2) Congress has given the agency the main responsibility for implementing the statute.

Even before Chevron, courts agreed that an agency’s statutory arguments were entitled to respectful consideration, given an agency’s expertise about the statute it administers and the practical and technical issues involved in implementing the law. (This is now known as Skidmore deference.) But Chevron upped the level of deference to agencies. It created a two-step test:

Step One. Is the statute’s meaning clear? If so, that meaning controls.

Step Two. If the statute is ambiguous, the agency’s interpretation will be upheld by the court provided it is reasonable, even if the court would have chosen an alternative interpretation.

https://legal-planet.org/2017/10/23/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-the-chevron-doctrine/

Kavanaugh And The “Chevron Doctrine”

August 2, 2018 By

Michael W. McConnell

(This article was first published on Defining Ideas—a Hoover Institution journal—on July 30, 2018.)

Opposition to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has almost nothing to do with the nominee himself, who is regarded by almost all serious observers as exceptionally accomplished, experienced, and judicious. He is opposed because his nominator is Donald Trump, and he is opposed because some Democrats feel cheated that President Obama’s 2016 nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, was never given a hearing or a vote. As a practical political matter, that is all that needs be said about the Kavanaugh appointment. Nonetheless, serious issues will be discussed, and one of the most serious and most discussed will be something known to lawyers as the “Chevron doctrine.”

https://law.stanford.edu/2018/08/02/kavanaugh-and-the-chevron-doctrine/

Supreme Court move could spell doom for power of federal regulators

05/01/2023 01:26 PM EDT

Conservatives get the chance to use a dispute over fisheries to deliver the final blow to Chevron deference.

A legal doctrine long despised by conservatives for giving federal regulators wide-ranging power is making yet another march to the gallows at the Supreme Court.

The high court announced Monday that it is taking up a case squarely aimed at killing off the nearly-four-decade-old precedent that has come to be known as Chevron deference: the principle that courts should defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous provisions in congressional statutes and judges should refrain from crafting their own reading of the laws.

Overturning the doctrine would have major implications for the Biden administration’s climate agenda. It would complicate the administration’s efforts to tackle major issues such as climate change via regulation, including possibly derailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s push to mitigate carbon emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors — the two highest polluting industries in the United States.

The Supreme Court’s move is another signal that the court’s conservatives have not tired in their efforts to weaken the administrative state. The top target is the case that played a pivotal role in expanding the powers of federal agencies after it was handed down in 1984: Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Chevron doctrine has “been in a coma for a while, so we’ll see whether they want to revive it or take it off life support,” said David Doniger, who in 1984 argued that case before the Supreme Court for the NRDC.

Just last fall, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the court had flinched too many times.

“At this late hour, the whole project deserves a tombstone no one can miss,” he wrote as the court passed up a Chevron-related case in November. “We should acknowledge forthrightly that Chevron did not undo, and could not have undone, the judicial duty to provide an independent judgment of the law’s meaning in the cases that come before the Nation’s courts.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2020 that “Chevron is in serious tension with the Constitution,” repudiating one of his own majority opinions from 2005 concluding that the Federal Communications Commission could invoke Chevron deference to justify decisions regulating internet services.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/01/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-climate-change-00094670

>>21111794

The Democrats can nominate Robert Kennedy Jr as the front runner

>>21112076

Here we fuckin go

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>>21112233

NOTABLE

Cant find any photos of Robert Kennedy and Donald Trump together…

>>21112283

concur

>>21112316

ffs, once the sr is dead the jr is no longer in effect