Supreme Court overturns decades-old Chevron ruling

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 40-year-old ruling that made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections, delivering a far-reaching and potentially profitable to business interests.

The court’s six conservative justices overturned the 1984 ruling, colloquially known as Chevron, long a target of conservatives. The liberal justices were in dissent.

Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in challenges that could be generated by the high court’s ruling. The Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer warned that such a move would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.”

The heart of the Chevron decision says federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details when laws are unclear. Opponents of the ruling argued that it gave the power that should be exercised by judges to experts working for the government.

“Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its statutory authority,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

Roberts wrote that the decision does not call into question previous cases that relied on the Chevron ruling.

But in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the guarantee rings hollow. “Most are optimistic; I’m not that much,” she wrote.

The court ruled in cases brought by Atlantic herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island who challenged the fee requirement. Lower courts used the Chevron ruling to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for government-mandated observers who track their fish intake.

Conservative and business interests strongly supported the fishermen’s appeals, betting that a court remade during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency would deal another blow to the regulatory state.

The court’s conservative majority has already reined in environmental regulations and halted the Democratic Biden administration’s initiatives on COVID-19 vaccines and student loan forgiveness.

Justices have not invoked Chevron since 2016, but lower courts have continued to do so.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled 6-0, with three justices recusing, that justices should play a limited and deferential role in evaluating the actions of agency experts in a case brought by environmental groups to challenge an administration effort Reagan to ease regulation of plants and factories.

“Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of any of the political branches of government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 1984, explaining why they should play a limited role.

But the current high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has been increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas questioned Chevron’s decision.

They were in the majority Friday, along with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan in dissent.

Opponents of the Chevron doctrine argue that judges apply it too often to decisions approved by government bureaucrats. Judges must exercise their own authority and judgment to say what the law is, they argued to the Supreme Court.

Defending the decisions that maintained the rates, President Joe Biden’s administration said that overturning the Chevron decision would produce a “convulsive shock” to the legal system.

Environmental and health advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, organized labor, and national and state Democrats urged the court to keep the Chevron decision in place.

“The Supreme Court is pushing the nation into uncharted waters as it seizes power from our elected branches of government to advance its deregulatory agenda,” Sambhav Sankar, a lawyer for the environmental group Earthjustice, said after the ruling. are aggressively reshaping the foundations of our government so that the President and Congress have less power to protect the public, and corporations have more power to defy regulations in pursuit of profits. This decision threatens the legitimacy of hundreds of regulations that keep us safe and protect us. our homes and environment, and create a level playing field for businesses to compete.

Gun, e-cigarette, farm, lumber and home construction groups were among the business groups supporting fishermen. Conservative interests that have also intervened in recent higher court cases limiting air and water pollution regulation have also supported fishermen.

The fisherman filed suit to challenge the 2020 regulation that would have authorized a fee that could exceed $700 per day, even though no one would ever have to pay it.

In separate lawsuits in New Jersey and Rhode Island, fishermen argued that Congress never gave federal regulators the authority to require fishermen to pay for monitors. They lost in the lower courts, which relied on Chevron’s decision to uphold the regulation.

The justices heard two cases on the same issue because Jackson was recused from the New Jersey case. She participated in it at an earlier stage, when she was a judge on an appeals court. The entire court participated in the Rhode Island case.