The Supreme Court took a tougher stance on executive branch power on Friday, overturning prominent precedents that had strengthened regulatory authority in a wide range of areas of American life, including consumer and environmental protection.
In an ideologically-aligned 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned four decades of administrative law precedent that had given federal agencies discretion to interpret ambiguous laws through rulemaking.
Known as Chevron deference, the now-overturned doctrine instructed judges to defer to government agencies when the law was unclear.
From now on, judges will be able to interpret the law as they see fit, rather than deferring to government agencies, making it effectively easier to overturn regulations that govern broad aspects of American life.
This includes rules governing toxic chemicals, drugs, pharmaceuticals, climate change, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and more.
“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote alongside five of his conservative colleagues.
“Courts must exercise their own judgment in determining whether a government agency acted within its statutory authority.”
But Roberts sought to block the ruling from impacting previous cases that had been decided based on the Chevron decision.
“We do not question past cases that have relied on the Chevron framework,” he wrote. “Precedents that hold that certain agency actions are lawful, including the Clean Air Act ruling against Chevron itself, remain subject to statutory precedential binding despite changes in our interpretation methods.”
The court’s three liberal justices wrote a dissenting opinion saying the court would now assume a “director role” that Congress had not given it. Justice Elena Kagan read her dissenting opinion from the bench, an unusual move that highlighted the justices’ sharp differences in the case.
“Chevron’s very essence respects the allocation of responsibility – the vestment of primary authority over regulatory matters in government agencies, not in courts,” Kagan wrote.
“Today, the majority does not respect that decision. It gives the court the power to make all kinds of scientific and technical judgments. It gives the court the power to make all kinds of policy decisions,” she added.
The move marks a major victory for conservatives and anti-regulatory advocates who have sought to eliminate the case as part of a broader attack on the expansion of the “administrative state.” The Biden administration has defended the case before the Supreme Court.
It also marked a major overturning of precedent by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who had upheld rules enacted under his mother, who served as EPA administrator in the Reagan administration. Justice Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion calling Chevron a “judge-invented fiction.”
“Today, the Supreme Court is erecting a Chevron tombstone that no one can miss. In doing so, it is returning Justices to the rules of interpretation that have guided the federal courts since the nation’s founding,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
Friday’s ruling comes in the wake of a series of Supreme Court decisions curtailing the executive branch’s powers.
The case is not the first time in recent years that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has taken back power from a federal agency.
The court ruled in 2021 that government agencies cannot make decisions on important issues without “express authorization from Congress,” raising the legal bar for agency action to be approved.
The Supreme Court is also considering whether to strike down the Securities and Exchange Commission’s internal enforcement system and require civil penalties, with a ruling expected later this month.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court stripped the Securities and Exchange Commission of its power.
But the conservative-majority Supreme Court last month upheld the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism, rejecting another challenge to the “administrative state.”
The challenges to Chevron in court came through two separate but similar lawsuits in which herring fishermen challenged rules that would have forced companies to cover the costs of sending federal monitors on their vessels.
In ruling against the fishermen, the lower court cited Chevron and deferred to the agency in cases known as Lopar Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Corp. v. Department of Commerce. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was removed from the case because he had been involved in the former case in the lower court.
Chevron’s history dates back to 1984, when environmentalists challenged the Reagan administration’s efforts to roll back air pollution regulations. The courts argued they should uphold the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act and defended the EPA’s actions.
While the principle theoretically applies equally to Democratic and Republican administrations, in recent years many conservatives have called for its repeal, arguing that deference to government agencies has allowed liberal administrations to enact broad regulatory regimes.
— Updated 10:46 a.m.
