I wonder if the conservative majority will use these recent decisions as precedent to overturn Chevron in what would be another shocking and shameless display of legislating from the bench.
Wonder ultimately how this will be handled once the Chevron Deference case is ruled on by the Supreme Court. The interpretations I've seen from other sources is that this will be overturned if the courts decide against the principle
The Chevron deference case is one of the most cited court cases in the US and this decision threatens to throw Federal regulations into chaos as a bunch of Districts redecide decades of precedent. Since the appeals courts can reach contradictory decisions and keep them in play until the Supreme Court makes a conclusive decision, any company at the national level will have to figure out how to square that circle.
Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, this is going to cause a practical mess just like the Dobbs decision, except Chevron deference impacts every area of federal regulation.
They are definitely defying precedent more than any Supreme Court in recent history.
The other thing this ignores is judicial bias. One positive of the Chevron ruling is that a well scoped agency with a clear agenda and expertise was able to oversee their domain of expertise and enforce rules under the Chevron Doctrine, which means in a well functioning agency (e.g. generally the SEC, FTC) didn’t have to rely on lengthy and often partisan court trials.
If you look at how we handle patents for instance, you have a good taste of what things going to look like going forward. It will completely hamstrung agencies and delay regulation enforcement for years if not decades. Unfortunately judges aren’t without bias and partisanship and this will reflect in the venues that get used for these hearings, like how most patent cases end up in a small Texas court due to how favorable that court is to patent holders.
This is going to be a mess. I don’t foresee judges deferring to agencies to speed up judicial review. I see courts becoming an even bigger partisan battle ground than they already are.
I think it's pretty unlikely that the Chevron doctrine would be overturned completely. The specifics of the case before the Court involve a case where the NMFS has interpreted a fisheries act to require fishers to pay the salaries of government monitors, simply because the act does not specify who should pay the salaries. The more reasonable objection is whether "reasonable interpretation" under Chevron should be limited to prevent the creation of affirmative powers out of thin air. As Wikipedia puts it:
> Whether the Court should overrule Chevron or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.
The initial "overrule Chevron" seems like a DITF [1] and the latter is probably what the plaintiffs are hoping to achieve. Granted, I find it hard to trust a Court that overruled PP v. Casey, but most of this Court's other rulings, at least, have not been as extreme.
If you read the dissent they seem to be claiming the majority opinion greatly expands the circumstances in which the major questions exception applies. Which would be a big hit to Chevron making it apply in far fewer cases.
> When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency's policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do. The responsibilities for assessing the wisdom of such policy choices and resolving the struggle between competing views of the public interest are not judicial ones: "Our Constitution vests such responsibilities in the political branches."
I haven't read the opinion in detail but it doesn't appear they touched Chevron, merely ruling this particular case falls under the preexisting major questions doctrine/exception to Chevron.
"(4) Because Chevron’s justifying presumption is, as Members of the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another. Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best, Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.”"
"Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S. 180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go. Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped judicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application."
I fail to see how this parade of horribles will happen. Under the Chevron regime, any random person could still sue, and provided that the lawsuit survived an initial motion to dismiss, then any questions involving an administrative agency policy would defer to that agency's interpretation of their own policy and the law authorizing that policy.
The only change now is that the agency will have to demonstrate to an independent Article III court that its policy is correct and compatible with the authorizing law. Stare decisis will still control the lower courts once new precedents are set, and people will have meaningful appeals again.
There might be some disruption in the short term, but in a decade or two, I expect the new normal will be fine, but with the benefit that people can meaningfully appeal self-aggrandizing administrative state rulings.
For those interested in learning more about the cases here, the precedent is referred to as "Chevron" [1] and the case seeking to overturn it this term is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo [2]. Cafe Insider discussed the case in detail this week [3].
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