WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump has been out of office for more than three years, but he just won a major victory at the Supreme Court.
Friday’s ruling that overturned a landmark 1984 ruling called Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was a late victory for Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with all three of his high court nominees joining the 6-3 conservative majority.
“The decision was the culmination of a decade-long campaign funded by billionaires to capture and weaponize the unelected power of the Supreme Court to deliver huge windfalls for corporate interests at the expense of ordinary Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former -Democratic official. in Congress that he is executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial oversight group.
During the Trump administration, the Republican-led Senate, which was tasked with confirming the president’s judicial nominees, “became a conveyor belt for ideological and corporatist judges,” he added.
Business groups welcomed the decision, with the National Federation of Independent Business saying Friday that it will “level the playing field in litigation between small businesses and administrative agencies.”
Taking down Chevron, a move that has long displeased business interests, has long been a goal of conservative lawyers, who saw it as granting too much power to bureaucrats.
The original ruling said that courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting laws that are ambiguous, but in Friday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts said that approach was “fundamentally flawed.”
“Perhaps more fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misplaced because agencies do not have special jurisdiction in resolving legal ambiguities. Courts do,” he added.
Don McGahn, Trump’s White House adviser, memorably said in 2018 at a conservative political conference that the president’s judicial selections and attempt to roll back regulations “are really the other side of the same coin.”
He cited Justice Neil Gorsuch, newly appointed at the time, as an example of what the administration was looking for in nominees. One reason Gorsuch appealed to McGahn and others who had a say his appointment in 2017 was that he had written a scathing opinion suggesting that Chevron should be taken down.
Gorsuch agreed with Robert’s majority opinion on Friday, as did fellow Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
McGahn, who is now back in private practice at the law firm Jones Day, did not respond to a request for comment on Friday’s decision. The Trump campaign also did not respond.
On another deregulation issue, the Supreme Court could act in the coming days on a petition filed by McGahn and his Jones Day colleagues that seeks to gut the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s power to set workplace safety rules.
Sean Donahue, a lawyer who frequently represents environmental groups, said the Chevron takedown has become “a litmus test of sorts” for the right in selecting judges, along with hostility to the Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling. Wade, which the Supreme Court struck down two years ago.
One criticism of the latest ruling — echoed by liberal Justice Elena Kagan in her dissenting opinion — is that the court is taking power away from federal agencies.
“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial arrogance. In recent years, this court has often taken upon itself the decision-making authority that Congress assigned to agencies,” Kagan wrote.
Democratic members of Congress also weighed in, with Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, describing the decision as “prioritizing corporate greed over the health, safety and well-being of the American people.”
The ruling came a day after the court, in another 6-3 decision along ideological lines, weakened the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission, provoking an equally vigorous dissent from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The fear among those on the left is that the Chevron decision will prevent agencies from addressing important issues like climate change, because judges will constantly question their expertise.
Whether the decision will have such a broad impact remains to be seen, with some commentators saying that, in most cases, judges will continue to pay close attention to what the agency’s experts say.
Thomas Berry, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the decision rightly ended a doctrine that gave too much power to agencies to judge the scope of their own power.
“Contrary to the views of dissenters, overturning the Chevron decision will not give judges new power to decide political issues,” he added.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
