Supreme Court Hears Case About Medical Benefits That Could Shake Administrative State
WASHINGTON—A lawyer for a Marine Corps veteran said to have been arbitrarily denied medical benefits urged the Supreme Court to overturn a bureaucracy-empowering legal doctrine that allowed the executive agency to refuse those benefits. If the court agrees with James Kisor, who seeks disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder arising out of his participation in Operation Harvest Moon, a bloody combat battle in Vietnam in December 1965, the stage could be set for invalidating the 35-year-old so-called Chevron doctrine, under which courts defer to agency interpretations of the statutes they enforce. If this happens, it could help work a smaller-government revolution that tears away at the legal underpinnings of the modern administrative state.
Critics call executive agencies the “fourth branch” of the U.S. government. They say officials in this so-called administrative state are unaccountable to voters and allow unelected bureaucrats to usurp the functions of governmental branches. Congress, they say, is supposed to make the laws of the land, but lawmakers have steadily ceded that body’s constitutionally prescribed powers to the administrative state, to the overall detriment of society. Current case law “allows agencies to regulate ambiguously and then interpret those regulations to taste later, with the expectation of forcing such reinterpretations on the courts,” which, in turn, leads to “the near complete erasure of Congress’ legislative power itself,” and robs the judiciary of its “power to ‘say what the law is,’” transforming “the judiciary from a check and balance on the executive into a rubber stamp,” the Pacific Legal Foundation stated in a friend-of-the-court brief.
In the landmark administrative law ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court held while courts “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress,” where courts find “Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue” and “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” In other words, under Chevron, an executive agency’s interpretation of a statute it administers is entitled to deference unless Congress has indicated otherwise.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-hears-case-about-medical-benefits-that-could-shake-administrative-state_2856317.html
JAMES L. KISOR, v. ROBERT WILKIE, SECRETARY OF VETERANS AFFAIRS,
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-15/82358/20190130164219000_AC%20BRIEF.pdf
Attacking Auer and Chevron Deference: A Literature Review
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2018/05/16-1-Attacking-Auer-and-Chevron-Deference.pdf
The Boring Supreme Court Case That Could Help Make America Great Again
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/the-boring-supreme-court-case-that-could-help-make-america-great-again/