The United States Supreme Court ruled Friday to curtail the power of government agencies to adopt sweeping regulatory powers based on nebulous direction from Congress.
The 6-3 opinion overturned a 1984 decision that has given federal agencies significant leeway for four decades to interpret ambiguous statutes guiding their rulemaking largely without interference from the courts.
Dissenting from the majority were Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three progressives on the Court.
For the past forty years under so-called “Chevron Deference,” federal agencies have been given the discretion to interpret “silent or ambiguous” statutes as they saw fit, typically without being subjected to judicial review.
The Chevron doctrine — a term derived from the name of the case that originated it, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. — established a two-step legal test for determining when judicial review of an agency’s statutory interpretation is appropriate.
“If Congress has explicitly left a gap for the agency to fill, there is an express delegation of authority to the agency to elucidate a specific provision of the statute by regulation,” the Chevron decision stated.
[RELATED: SCOTUS Could Change How Government Agencies’ Power is Defined and Shaped by Chevron Doctrine]
The specific set of cases that spurred Friday’s ruling focused on a rule promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in 2020 requiring that fishermen cover the cost of third-party monitors on their vessels.
However, the implications of their decision to overturn Chevron will be far-reaching — in Maine and nationally.
As a result of this ruling, courts will now have the ability to “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
Additionally, the loss of Chevron may cause Members of Congress to begin articulating the details of policies in written legislation rather than leaving room for unelected federal bureaucrats fill in the gaps in vaguely written bills.
“The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous,” the majority wrote. “Chevron is overruled.”
“Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided,” argued the Justices of the majority opinion. “It reshaped judicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application.”
The majority went on to call Chevron “unworkable” due to the fact that the “defining feature of its framework…has always evaded meaningful definition.”
“The Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only adding to Chevron’s unworkability, and the doctrine continues to spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained,” they wrote.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he agreed in full with the Court’s ruling but wrote “separately to underscore a more fundamental problem” with Chevron deference.
According to Justice Thomas, this doctrine represented a violation of the separation of powers as it is outlined in the Constitution because it “compels judges to abdicate their Article III ‘judicial Power'” and “permits the Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion focused on “why the proper application of the doctrine of stare decisis supports” placing “a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”
Generally speaking, stare decisis refers to the judicial principle of giving deference to past precedent when deciding questions in future cases.
Justice Gorsuch delves more deeply into the history of stare decisis, arguing that it is, at times, necessary for the Court to go against precedent to “correct its past mistakes.”
“When it comes to correcting errors of constitutional interpretation, the Court has stressed the importance of doing so, for they can be corrected otherwise only through the amendment process,” Gorsuch wrote.
He also cautions against “read[ing] judicial opinions like statutes” because “when judges reach a decision in our adversarial system, they render a judgment based only on the factual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen to develop.”
“Stare decisis’s true lesson today is not that we are bound to respect Chevron’s ‘startling development,’ but bound to inter it,” Gorsuch concluded.
The dissenting opinion filed by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson argued that Chevron deference provided a solution for when Congress leaves “an ambiguity or gap” in a statute, allowing agencies to fill in the blanks.
“This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent,” they wrote. “Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court.”
“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,” the dissent states. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
The dissenting Justices also go on to argue that courts are not adequately equipped to “resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes.”
According to these Justices, Friday’s ruling “puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import.”
“All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power and courts not enough,” the dissenting Justices conclude. “But shifting views about the worth of regulatory actors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone of administrative law.”
As a result of Friday’s ruling, the lower court decisions — which relied upon the Chevron doctrine — were vacated and the cases were remanded for further proceedings.
Click Here to Read the Supreme Court’s Full Opinion
It is my opinion that the “administrative state” ie: bureacratic jungle run by and hugely-benefitting from taxpayers needs to be reined in,and the quicker the better, when it comes to private property. We who own small woodlands are FORCED by administrative dictat to pay 3rd parties a fee of (approx) $300 to write a Plan of what we are to do and not do with our own land.
There are, naturally, people who care nothing about the environment, but I’m willing to lay odds that they’re few and far between.
Wow!! Some common sense coming out of DC? Hard to believe.
Speaking of Taxpayers, the Chevron decision will have repercussions with the IRS.😁
This is great news for our country.
This court is a wonderful legacy of the Trump presidency.