Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine

When Congress writes a law that establishes a new regulatory agency, they outline what that agency does and how they enforce the regulations. Inevitably as time goes on, new edge cases come up or someone realize that the law is ambiguous. Chevron deference established a precedent where the regulatory agencies were allowed to resolve these ambiguous cases or do things not specifically written into the law. This decision means that companies can now fight certain decisions they couldn't previously.

For example, one of the cases that led up to this was due to the National Marine Fisheries Service forcing fishing companies to pay their monitors' salaries. The law established the monitors and their role, but it did not say that the companies must foot the bill.

From Justice Kagan's dissent on page 82:

> This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent. Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes...

> It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court...

> Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court has explained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have “desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whatever degree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741 (1996).

> Today, the Court flips the script: It is now “the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education.

Some folks were predicting this:

> It has been nearly 40 years since the Supreme Court indicated in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. After more than three-and-a-half hours of oral argument on Wednesday, it seemed unlikely that the rule outlined in that case, known as the Chevron doctrine, will survive in its current form. A majority of the justices seemed ready to jettison the doctrine or at the very least significantly limit it.

* https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-d...

Some of the back and forth during the trial:

> Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with Kagan. She doubted whether there can be a “best” interpretation of a law when the justices “routinely disagree” about a law’s meaning. The real question, she said, is who makes the choice about what an ambiguous law means. And if the court needs a “tie-breaker,” she continued, why shouldn’t it defer to the agency, with its expertise?

> Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson posited that the Chevron doctrine serves an important purpose. Under Chevron, she suggested, Congress gives federal agencies the power to make policy choices – such as filling gaps or defining terms in the statute. But if Chevron is overturned and agencies no longer have that power, she predicted, then courts will have to make those kinds of policy decisions.

> But Justice Brett Kavanaugh saw Chevron’s deference to agencies differently. Chevron, he complained, “ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in” and implements “massive change” in areas like securities law, communications law, and environmental law.

* Ibid.

See also perhaps:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....

Generally: it seems that the USSC has been more been willing to throw out precedent and (not so?) settled law.

The USSC is about to go on 'summer break', and so is releasing quite a few rulings all at once in a short time frame; a running tally seems to be available at:

* https://www.scotusblog.com/author/scotusblog/

Some seem to think this is a bit of a 'news dump' and 'DoS of attention':

* https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-ju...

* https://www.msnbc.com/alex-wagner-tonight/watch/-news-dump-f...

* https://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/

A regulatory body who is not responsible or beholden to the citizenry, and who cannot effectively be balanced by another portion of government?

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