The high court overruled the Chevron precedent. It’s not entirely unexpected but like Dobbs it’s going to have huge ramifications. Kate Riga at TPM:
The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself. In overruling Chevron, the Court decided that federal agencies no longer get to fill in the gaps of Congress’ laws with their experts’ own reasonable interpretation of how to carry them out; that authority now resides in the judiciary. It’s a power grab that the right-wing legal world has been marching towards for years — and they finally got a Court activist enough to do it.
Chief Justice John Roberts, often the tip of the spear for this movement, wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan, probably the Court’s best pro-agency voice, wrote the dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote solo concurrences.
Roberts completed the takeover with very little humility. The thinking underlying Chevron deference is that agencies are staffed by experts who understand the technicalities of their subject matter, and are best equipped to mold often broad statutes into day-to-day regulations. Judges, on the other hand, have no special insight into, say, the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations to find permissible amounts of air pollution from a factory, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s experience with how factories should be laid out.
“Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise,” Roberts hand-waved.
In fulfilling his right-wing mission, Roberts also pretends that letting judges, rather than agencies, fill in statutory specifics won’t result in a whipsawing based on the judges’ partisan leanings — since, per Robrters, judges don’t act on them. That’ll come as a surprise to the Biden administration, which has seen everything from power plant regulations to student debt relief summarily shot down by the conservative supermajority. “Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences,” he intoned.
Roberts tried to downplay the ramifications of the ruling by asserting that old agency cases decided by Chevron deference are still good law and beholden to the precedent the Court so blithely tossed away on Friday.
Kagan made plain the extent of the majority’s grasp for power in her dissent.“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,” she wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
That’s very bad. Every regulation will now be subject to some district court judge’s interpretation of some statue they have absolutely no experience or expertise to interpret. It will take years for any regulation to wend its way through the courts. Get ready for even more rapid climate change.
They also made homelessness a crime by saying that sleeping in public that can be prosecuted even if someone is sleeping in their own car. And they made it possible to overturn some of the January 6th cases saying the application of statute against obstruction of a proceeding was an overreach (at least in some cases.) We’ll have to see how that shakes out but it could affect Trump’s January 6th case as well.
Roberts announced that the last cases will be handed down on Monday and that means we have to wait all weekend for the big immunity case. I’m fairly sure they’re going to find a reason to send it back down, further delaying it until 2025. If Trump wins, the charges will be thrown out and if he loses they’ll probably make sure that there’s enough to protect Trump.
I think we should all consider starting cocktail hour early today…
