What it means for the Supreme Court to throw out Chevron decision, undercutting federal regulators
WASHINGTON — Executive agencies are likely to have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety, and other issues under a far-reaching ruling by the Supreme Court.
The court’s 6-3 ruling Friday overturned a 1984 decision popularly known as Chevron. It instructed lower courts to let federal agencies take charge when laws passed by Congress are not crystal clear.
The 40-year-old decision has been the basis for enforcement of thousands of rules by dozens of federal agencies, but has long been a target of conservatives and business groups who say it grants too much power to the executive branch, or so some critics argue. call the administrative state.
The Biden administration has defended the law and warned that rolling back the so-called Chevron deference would be destabilizing and could cause a “convulsive shock” to the country’s justice system.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that federal judges “must exercise their independent judgment in determining whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
The ruling does not overturn previous cases that relied on the Chevron doctrine, Roberts wrote.
Here’s a look at the court’s decision and the implications for future government regulations.
Atlantic herring fishermen sued over federal rules requiring them to pay independent monitors to monitor their catch. The fishermen argued that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 did not authorize officials to create industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the National Marine Fisheries Service had not followed proper rulemaking process.
In two related cases, the fishermen asked the court to strike down the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which stems from a unanimous Supreme Court case involving the energy giant in a dispute over the Clean Air Act. That ruling said judges must defer to the executive branch when laws passed by Congress are ambiguous.
In that case, the court upheld an action by the Environmental Protection Agency under then-President Ronald Reagan.
In the decades since the ruling, Chevron has been a cornerstone of modern administrative law, requiring judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of congressional statutes.
But the current Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, is increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch questioned Chevron’s decision. Ironically, it was Gorsuch’s mother, former EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, who made the decision that the Supreme Court upheld in 1984.
With a deeply divided Congress, presidential administrations have increasingly turned to federal regulation to implement policy changes. Federal regulations affect nearly every aspect of daily life, from the food we eat and the cars we drive to the air we breathe and the homes we live in.
For example, President Joe Biden’s administration has issued a series of new regulations on the environment and other priorities, including limits on emissions power plants And vehicle exhaust pipesand rules about student debt cancellation, overtime pay and affordable housing.
These and other actions could be opened up to legal challenges if judges are allowed to discount or ignore the expertise of the executive agencies that initiated these actions.
With potentially billions of dollars at stake, groups representing the gun industry and other industries such as tobacco, agriculture, timber and homebuilding were among those who pressured the judges to overturn the Chevron doctrine and weaken government regulation.
The American Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus curiae brief last year on behalf of business groups that argued that the modern application of Chevron has “fostered the glorification” of executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts.
David Doniger, a lawyer and veteran official at the Natural Resources Defense Council who argued the original Chevron case in 1984, said he feared that a ruling to overturn the doctrine would “give judges free rein to be radical activists” who “could effectively rewrite our laws and block the protections they are intended to provide.”
“The net effect will be to weaken our government’s ability to address the real problems the world presents to us – big things like COVID and climate change,” Doniger said.
“This case was never just about fish,” said Meredith Moore of the environmental group Ocean Conservancy. Instead, corporations and other interests used the herring fishery “to attack the foundations of the public institutions that serve the American public and preserve our natural resources,” she said.
The court’s ruling is likely to open the floodgates to lawsuits that could erode critical protections for people and the environment, Moore and other advocates said.
“For more than 30 years, fisheries observers have successfully helped ensure that our oceans are managed responsibly so that fishing can continue into the future,” said Dustin Cranor of Oceana, another conservation group.
He called the case “just the latest example of the far right attempting to undermine the federal government’s ability to protect our oceans, waters, public lands, clean air and health.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey called the decision a fitting follow-up to a 2022 ruling — in a case he brought — that limits the EPA’s ability to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The court held that Congress must speak with specificity when granting an agency the authority to make regulations on a matter of major national importance.
Morrisey, now the Republican candidate for governor, called Chevron “a specious doctrine that allows courts to make legally questionable interpretations of laws promulgated by federal administrative agencies.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling will almost certainly shift power from the executive branch and Congress to the courts, said Craig Green, a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.
“Federal judges now have the first and final say on what statutes mean,” he said. “That’s a big power shift.”
In what some observers see as a historical irony, many of the conservatives who now attack Chevron once celebrated it. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was among those who praised the original ruling as a way to rein in liberal laws.
“Conservatives believed in this rule until they didn’t,” Green said in an interview.
In recent years, conservatives have focused on “deconstructing the administrative state,” even though the result diminishes the ability of a conservative president to impose his beliefs on government agencies.
“If you weaken the federal government, you get less government,” Green said, an outcome that many conservatives, including those who supported former President Donald Trump, applaud.
The ruling is likely to “scramble things up for federal agencies and make it even harder for them to address major problems, which is exactly what Chevron’s critics want,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental and energy law program at Harvard Law School.