WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has been out of office for more than three years, but recently scored a major victory at the Supreme Court.
Friday’s ruling, which overturned a landmark 1984 decision called Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, was a late victory for Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with all three of his Supreme Court nominees joining the 6-3 conservative majority.
“The decision was the culmination of a decades-long, billionaire-funded campaign to seize the unelected power of the Supreme Court and use it as a weapon to deliver huge windfalls to corporate interests at the expense of ordinary Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former Democratic congressional staffer who is executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial oversight group.
During the Trump administration, the Republican-led Senate, tasked with confirming the president’s judicial nominees, became “a conveyor belt for ideological, corporatist judges,” he added.
Business groups applauded the ruling, with the National Federation of Independent Business saying Friday that it “will level the playing field in litigation between small businesses and administrative agencies.”
Undoing Chevron, a ruling long resented by business interests, has long been a goal of conservative advocates, who argued it would give bureaucrats too much power.
The original decision said courts should be guided by federal agencies in interpreting laws that were ambiguous, but in Friday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts said that approach was “fundamentally misguided.”
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s assumption is misguided because agencies have no special authority in resolving regulatory ambiguities. Courts do,” he added.
Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, memorably told a conservative political conference in 2018 that the president’s judicial selections and attempted regulatory rollbacks “are really two sides of the same coin.”
He cited Judge Neil Gorsuch, who had just been appointed at the time, as an example of what the administration was looking for in nominees. One of the reasons Gorsuch appealed to McGahn and others who had a say in his nomination in 2017 was because he had written a scathing opinion suggesting that Chevron should be rolled back.
Gorsuch signed Robert’s majority opinion on Friday, as did fellow Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
McGahn, who is now back in private practice at the law firm Jones Day, did not respond to a request for comment on Friday’s ruling. The Trump campaign also did not respond.
On another deregulation issue, the Supreme Court could act in the coming days on a petition filed by McGahn and his Jones Day colleagues that seeks to undermine the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s power to set workplace safety rules .
Sean Donahue, a lawyer who often represents environmental groups, said the undoing of Chevron became “kind of a litmus test” for the right to select judges, along with hostility to the abortion rights ruling in Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court took two years to destroyed ago. past.
One criticism of the latest ruling — which was also echoed by liberal Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent — is that the court is taking power away from itself from federal agencies.
“A rule of judicial humility is giving way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent years, this Court has too often usurped the agency decision-making authority that Congress had granted to agencies,” Kagan wrote.
Democratic members of Congress also spoke out, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) describing the ruling as “prioritizing corporate greed over the health, safety and well-being of the American people.”
The ruling came a day after the court, in a separate 6-3 decision over ideological considerations, weakened the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power, prompting an equally forceful protest from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The fear among left-wing parties is that the Chevron ruling will prevent government agencies from dealing with important issues such as climate change, because judges will constantly doubt their expertise.
Whether the ruling will have such a broad impact remains to be seen, with some commentators saying that in most cases, judges will still pay close attention to what agency experts say.
Thomas Berry, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the ruling rightly ended a doctrine that gave agencies too much power to assess the extent of their own power.
“Contrary to the view of the dissenters, overruling Chevron will not give the justices renewed power to decide policy issues,” he added.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
