Avril Elfi from OAN
June 29, 2024 (Saturday) 9:07 AM
The Supreme Court overturned the 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which required the judiciary to defer to government agencies when the law is unclear.
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Federal regulations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that require fishermen to pay $700 a day to “offshore observers” are outside the scope of the authority Congress gave the agency, the court majority said in a 6-2 decision.
The Supreme Court in January heard two lawsuits brought by fishermen in Rhode Island and New Jersey challenging NOAA rules that they say could destroy their livelihoods.
The Chevron doctrine, a legal doctrine developed in the 1980s, holds that when a federal regulation is challenged, courts should accept an agency’s reasonable interpretation of whether Congress granted the agency the right to issue the rule unless Congress directly addressed the issue. This doctrine has been rejected by court decisions.
“Chevron overrules,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority opinion. “Courts must exercise their own judgment in determining whether an agency acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to executive branch decisions may aid in that investigation. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency subject to constitutional limitations, courts must ensure that the agency acts within the scope of its authority while respecting the delegation.”
“But courts are not required to do so, and under the APA, they cannot defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law simply because the statute is ambiguous,” he added. “Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to ignore statutory obligations.”
“And the only way to ‘ensure that the law evolves in a principled and understandable way, rather than simply changing haphazardly,’ is for us to leave Chevron behind,” he said, citing Vasquez v. Hillary.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that deferring to Chevron “permits the executive branch to exercise powers not otherwise given to it.”
“Deference to Chevron ‘is not an innocent transfer of power,'” Thomas writes. “‘The Constitution carefully imposes structural constraints on all three branches, and any exercise of power free from those constraints would subvert the intent of the Constitution’s ratifiers.’ In particular, the Founding Fathers wrote that ‘the Court [would] Correctly interpret the law and check the administration.
“Chevron fundamentally undermined the separation of powers, strengthening the power of the executive branch while unjustly stripping the courts of judicial power. Overruling Chevron would restore this aspect of the separation of powers,” he said.
Fishermen claim that the costs of marine monitors are costing them 20 percent of their income.
Dissenting from the majority, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Chevron “has shaped the context in which Congress, the courts, the agencies of government, and all regulated parties and citizens operate for decades. It has been applied in thousands of judicial decisions.”
“Courts have become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting all kinds of regulatory efforts — keeping our air and water clean, our food and medicine safe, and financial markets fair, to name just a few. Judges are not experts in their fields, and they do not belong to either political branch of government,” Kagan wrote. “Back then, we knew what we were not. Between the courts and the agencies, it was common for Congress to think that the agencies were the better choice to resolve ambiguities and fill gaps in regulatory law.”
“Because the agencies are ‘experts in their field,’ and because they are part of the political branch with the power to set cross-border policy, Congress has tasked them, not us, with implementing statutes that contain unresolved issues,” she continued. “At its core, Chevron respects the allocation of responsibility – giving primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not the courts.”
Jerry Lehman, CEO of the New England Fisheries Management Association (NEFSA), praised Friday’s decision, saying federal officials “typically ignore America’s fishermen’s well-founded concerns about over-regulation.”
“We are grateful that the Supreme Court bucked this trend, and we are especially grateful to the fisherman plaintiffs in Relentless and Roper Bright who have been fighting for years on behalf of their fellow fishermen around the world,” he added.
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