A series of decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court in late June brought some very positive developments and one major disappointment. The decisions limited the power of the federal executive branch, a much-needed corrective step that marks the beginning of the dismantling of the unconstitutional federal regulatory state.
More importantly, the judgment has laid the foundation for the restoration of the nation’s constitutional order, which will be further developed in future litigation.
“Courts interpret statutes without regard to context and based on traditional tools of statutory interpretation, not on individual policy preferences.” We’ll get to that later.
This includes re-establishing the separation of powers within the federal government and states’ authority over police powers and other matters not expressly assigned to the federal government by the Constitution. On the latter, there is still much more work to be done, but the decisions made this session are a good start.
In a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, court The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot use representative actions to prosecute people for fraud. Such cases must be decided in federal court, the justices ruled by a 6-3 vote. The use of representative actions violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, the court said.
This ruling will likely extend to other regulatory and enforcement agencies. I agree with Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, who wrote that the ruling is a “major shift” and that “the constitutionality of hundreds of statutes is now in jeopardy, and dozens of agencies may be stripped of their power to enforce the laws of Congress.” Justice Sotomayor and other dissenters argue that dismantling the regulatory state would be a very bad thing. On the contrary, it would be a very good thing for the American people. More importantly, enforcement without trials is unconstitutional and deeply un-American.
In another 6-3 decision written by Roberts, the Court Judgment of indictment not established On January 6, the court charged the defendants with obstruction of justice under a law designed to prevent the destruction of documents or tampering with evidence in criminal investigations. The majority acknowledged that the law was not intended to apply to any possible “interference” with an “official proceeding.” However, two of the four charges in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump are based on the law.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her dissent that “statutes often go beyond the issues that prompted them to be enacted, and under the rules of statutory construction, we stick to the letter anyway.” This kind of broad interpretation of federal law is judicial positivism, and it’s obvious, and it’s caused problems for decades. Now the justices are Regularly discuss legal and constitutional provisions In the cases they preside over, this position is known as “literalism,” and it’s a major advancement from what courts have done for decades.
Suppress activity
Similarly, the court Snyder v. United States It is wrong to prosecute state and local officials for bribery under federal law because that power resides with the states. States have the “prerogative to regulate the scope of permissible interactions between state officials and their constituents,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion. This decision is an important affirmation of state police power and a welcome constraint on the federal government.
in Grants Pass vs. JohnsonThe Supreme Court voted 6-3 to reject a lower court ruling that held that cities cannot impose fines or jail time for violating public camping ordinances when the number of homeless people exceeds the number of “actually available” shelter beds. “The Court held that enforcement of a generally applicable law regulating camping on public lands does not constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Moreover, the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause “prohibits certain methods of punishment the government may impose after a criminal conviction, but [any] “It places substantial limits on what states can criminalize.” For decades, the Supreme Court has expanded the power of the federal government while limiting the power of state and local governments. Grants Pass This decision is a welcome reversal of the unconstitutional practice of judicial activism and restores a full range of judicial power to the states. Police power.
Put aside your respect for Chevron.
Finally, the long-awaited decision Roper v. Raimondo The Supreme Court has revoked federal agencies’ permission to write regulations as they see fit, so long as their interpretations of vaguely worded Congressional laws are not embarrassingly unreasonable. Federal regulators have run wild for 40 years under this doctrine, known as “Chevron deference” after a 1984 Supreme Court decision, but the practice began in the New Deal era.
The Chevron decision upended the constitutional order and facilitated a massive expansion of the regulatory state: lawmakers passed laws full of generalities that transformed a permanent bureaucracy into ever greater government power, while insulating lawmakers from responsibility for their decisions.
The court ruled to recover the damages. Roper is comprehensive and clear: “The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to use their own discretion when determining whether an agency acted within its statutory authority, and courts cannot defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law simply because the law is ambiguous. Chevron is overruled.”
Roberts, writing for a 6-2 majority (with Ketanji Brown Jackson recusing himself), declared that the Chevron decision was moot and that it unfairly limited the court’s power to rule on the legality of executive branch actions.
“We cannot reconcile Chevron with the APA by presuming that statutory ambiguities are implied delegations to government agencies,” the Chief Justice wrote. “That presumption does not approximate reality. Statute ambiguities do not necessarily reflect Congress’ intent that resulting questions of interpretation be resolved by government agencies, not by courts.”
Resolving legal ambiguities, Roberts noted, is actually the responsibility and expertise of the courts: “Perhaps most fundamentally, the Chevron presumption is wrong because government agencies have no special authority to resolve legal ambiguities. The courts do. The Framers of the Constitution anticipated that courts would frequently be faced with legal ambiguities and expected the courts to resolve them by issuing independent legal judgments.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Chevron deference is not an encouragement to judicial lawmaking, Roberts argued. “Courts interpret statutes according to traditional means of statutory interpretation, regardless of context, not according to personal policy preferences.” That’s something to watch. Chevron deference was created as a way to prevent courts from unreasonably reinterpreting federal law. But the Supreme Court was right to strike down Chevron deference. If anyone is going to make that mistake, that’s the judiciary’s job.
The Failure of the First Amendment
Unfortunately, not all of the court’s decisions in its final week were so sensible. Murthy v. MissouriThe court allowed the government to intimidate, persuade and bribe media organizations to help the president’s reelection campaign by suppressing bad news about the president and silencing reader and contributor comments critical of Biden.
Instead of making a ruling on the facts of the case, which revolved around the federal government’s actions, the court majority found that the plaintiffs “have failed to demonstrate a significant risk of harm from the government defendants in the near future that would qualify for the injunctive relief they seek.”
The ruling indicates that plaintiffs can sue media organizations for damages for past actions, but of course the lawsuits are aimed at the Biden administration’s alleged misconduct. The majority declined to block the Biden administration now because the court did not find enough evidence to be persuaded that the Biden campaign would pressure media organizations to do the same this time around.
In a dissenting opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch), the plaintiffs argued that they had presented ample evidence showing that the Biden administration’s actions had harmed the defendants.
“For months in 2021 and 2022, federal officials at the highest levels implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially devastating consequences if it did not comply with their requests to curb certain COVID-19-related speech,” Alito wrote. “Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly caved, to Hines’ undeniable harm as a result, and the officials’ continued efforts resulted in her receiving those same threats when she filed her lawsuit.”
Justice Alito concluded that the Court majority had abdicated its responsibility to protect the public from federally instigated censorship: “It is clearly unconstitutional, and the nation may come to regret that the Court did not say so.” The dissenters were right: the majority had indulged in overly smug reasoning to avoid a politically heated issue.
Overall, the Supreme Court has made great strides this term toward restoring the nation’s constitutional structure. It has emphasized the separation of powers and the right of states and people to govern themselves without federal interference in areas outside the Constitution’s authority. This is a historic, surprising, and unexpected development.
