WASHINGTON (AP) — Executive agencies are likely to face greater difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a sweeping Supreme Court ruling.
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 formed the basis for the enforcement of thousands of rules by dozens of federal agencies. However, it has long been a target of conservatives and business groups who argue it gives too much power to the executive branch, or what some critics call the administrative state.
The Biden administration has defended the law, warning that rolling back the so-called Chevron stay would be destabilizing and could cause a “convulsive shock” to the country’s justice system.
Judge of the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugha longtime critic, suggested during oral arguments on the case that Chevron itself “sends shocks into the system every four or eight years when a new administration takes office,” with a president from one party replacing a leader from the other .
Below you can read the court’s ruling and the consequences for future government regulation.
What is the Chevron decision?
Atlantic herring fishermen have filed a lawsuit over federal rules that require them to pay for independent observers to monitor their catch. The fishermen argued that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 did not authorize officials to set industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to follow proper regulatory process.
In two related cases, Fisher 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 a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Protection Agency under then-President Ronald Reagan.
In the decades following the ruling, Chevron became a cornerstone of modern administrative law. It requires judges to consider reasonable interpretations of congressional laws by government agencies.
But the current Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has become increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Along with Kavanaugh, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch have challenged the Chevron decision. Ironically, it was Gorsuch’s mother, former EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, who made the decision that the Supreme Court upheld in 1984.
What is at stake?
With a deeply divided Congress, presidential administrations have increasingly turned to federal regulations to implement policy changes. Federal regulations affect virtually every aspect of daily life, from the food we eat and the cars we drive to the air we breathe and the homes in which we live.
For example, President Joe Biden’s administration has issued a series of new rules on the environment and other priorities, including limits on emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes, and rules on student loan forgiveness, overtime pay and affordable housing.
These and other measures may be legally challenged if judges are allowed to disregard or ignore the expertise of the executive agencies that introduced these measures.
With potentially billions of dollars at stake, groups representing the gun industry and other industries such as tobacco, agriculture, timber and homebuilding pressured the judges to overturn the Chevron doctrine and weaken government regulation.
Last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of business groups, arguing that Chevron’s modern application “extends” executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts.
David Doniger, a lawyer and former Natural Resources Defense Council official who argued the original Chevron case in 1984, said he feared that a ruling to overturn the doctrine could “free judges to be radical activists” who “could effectively rewrite our laws and block protections.” they must 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.
More than just fish
“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 very foundation of government agencies that serve the American public and protect our natural resources,” she said.
Moore and other advocates say taking down Chevron would likely lead to lawsuits that could undermine essential protections for people and the environment.
“For more than three decades, fisheries observers have successfully helped ensure that our oceans are managed responsibly so that fisheries 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 cases a fitting follow-up to a 2022 decision — in a case he brought — that limited the EPA’s ability to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The court ruled that Congress must speak with specificity if it wants to give an agency the authority to make rules on an issue of major national importance.
Morrisey, now the Republican candidate for governor, called Chevron “a specious doctrine under which courts submit to legally questionable interpretations of laws promulgated by federal administrative agencies.”
A shift towards judiciary
The Supreme Court ruling is likely to shift power away from the executive branch and Congress and toward the courts, said Craig Green, a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.
If Chevron falls, “the federal judges will now have the first and last say on what the statutes mean,” he said before the ruling. “That’s a major power shift.”
While Republicans now attack Chevron, it was once celebrated by conservative supporters like the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who saw it 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 the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” he said, even as the result reduces a conservative president’s ability to impose his beliefs on government agencies.
“If you weaken the federal government, you have less government,” Green said — an outcome that many conservatives, including those who supported former President Donald Trump, welcome.
The ruling will likely “reduce the work on federal agencies and make it even more difficult for them to tackle major problems. That’s exactly what Chevron’s critics want,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental and energy law program at Harvard Law School.
