The Supreme Court takes up major challenges to the power of federal regulators
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear commercial fishermen’s challenges to a compensation requirement that could achieve a long-sought goal of business and conservative interests: limiting a wide range of government regulations.
Billions of dollars may be at stake for a court that, like the rest of the federal judiciary, has been reconfigured during Donald Trump’s presidency by conservative interests motivated as much by weakening the regulatory state as by social issues, including abortion.
Lawyers for the fishermen are asking the justices to overturn a 40-year-old decision that is among the most cited high court cases in support of regulatory power, including in areas such as the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protection.
Lower courts used the decision colloquially known as Chevron to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for government-mandated monitors to track their fish intake.
The 1984 decision states that when laws are not crystal clear, federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details, as long as they come up with a reasonable interpretation. “Judges are not experts in this field, and are not part of any of the political branches of government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court in 1984, explaining why they should play a limited role. The court ruled 6-0, with three judges dismissing.
But the current Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three Trump appointees, is increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. At least four justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have questioned Chevron’s decision.
Opponents of the Chevron doctrine argue that judges too often apply it to rubber-stamp decisions made by government bureaucrats. Judges must exercise their own authority and judgment to say what the law is, attorneys for the company that owns the Rhode Island fishing boats Relentless and Persistence told the court.
They also say agencies effectively act as judges in their own cases. “It is patently unfair for a court to defer to an agency’s interpretation in cases where the agency itself is litigious, before that same court, in the actual case before it,” the lawyers wrote.
The Biden administration defended the rulings that upheld the fees, saying reversing Chevron’s decision would cause a “convulsive shock” to the legal system.
“Chevron places due importance on the expertise, often of a scientific or technical nature, that federal agencies can bring to bear in interpreting federal statutes,” Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote on behalf of the government.
Environmental and health advocacy groups, civil rights groups, organized labor and Democrats at the national and state levels are urging the court to leave the Chevron decision in place.
Gun, e-cigarette, farm, timber and homebuilding groups are among the business groups supporting the fishermen. Conservative interests that also intervened in recent lawsuits seeking to limit regulation of air and water pollution also support the fishermen.
The judges are hearing two cases on the same issue. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is being subpoenaed in one case, from New Jersey, because she participated in it at an earlier stage when she was an appellate judge. The full court is participating in the case from Rhode Island, which the justices added to their docket several months later.