Supreme Court weakens federal regulators by overturning Chevron decision from decades ago

WASHINGTON (AP) – Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 40-year-old decision that made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protection, delivering a far-reaching and potentially lucrative victory for business interests.

The Court’s six conservative judges overturned the 1984 decision, commonly known as the Chevronlong a target of conservatives. Liberal judges disagreed.

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

A heart belonging to Chevron decision says federal agencies should be able to fill in details when the law isn’t crystal clear. Opponents of the decision argued that it gave power that should be exercised by judges to experts working for the government.

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

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

But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the assurance rang hollow. “Most are optimistic; I am not so much,” she wrote.

Kagan called the latest decision “another example of the Supreme Court’s determination to limit agency powers despite congressional orders to the contrary.”

The court issued a ruling in the cases filed by Atlantic herring New Jersey and Rhode Island fishermen who challenged the fee requirement. Lower courts used the Chevron decision to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that requires herring fishermen to pay government-authorized observers to track their fish consumption.

Conservatives and business leaders strongly supported the fishermen’s appeal, expecting the court, which was rebuilt under Republican Donald Trump, to deal another blow to the regulatory state.

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

Judges had not cited the Chevron ruling since 2016, but lower courts continued to do so.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-0 majority, with three justices disqualified, that justices should play a limited, submissive role in assessing the actions of agency experts in a case brought by environmental groups to challenge the Reagan administration’s actions to ease regulations on power plants and factories.

“Judges are not experts in their field and are not part of either branch of political power,” 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 authority of federal agencies. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all questioned the Chevron decision.

On Friday, they were in the majority, as was Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

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

Opponents of the Chevron doctrine say judges have too often applied it to rubber stamp decisions made by government bureaucrats. Judges must use their own authority and judgment to determine what the law is, the court said Friday, accepting opponents’ arguments.

Bill Bright, a fisherman from Cape May, New Jersey, who was a party to the lawsuit, said the decision to take down Chevron would help fishing companies make a living. “Nothing is more important than protecting the livelihoods of our families and crews,” Bright said in a statement.

Defending the rulings that upheld the charges, President Joe Biden’s administration said overturning the Chevron decision would send a “convulsive shock” through the legal system.

Environmental, health, and civil rights groups, labor unions, and Democrats at the national and state levels urged the court to uphold the Chevron ruling.

“The Supreme Court is pushing the country into uncharted waters by seizing power from our elected branches of government to promote its deregulatory agenda,” Sambhav Sankar, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice, said after the ruling. “Conservative judges are aggressively changing the foundations of our government so that the president and Congress have less power to protect the public and corporations have more power to challenge regulations in search of profits. This ruling threatens the legality of hundreds of regulations that keep us safe, protect our homes and the environment, and create a level playing field for businesses to compete.”

Business groups supporting fishermen included gun, e-cigarette, farm, timber and home construction groups. Conservative interests that have also intervened in recent Supreme Court cases restricting regulation air AND water pollution also supported fishermen.

Rybak filed a lawsuit challenging a 2020 ordinance that would allow the fee to be charged at more than $700 per day, even though no one has ever had 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 the monitors. They lost in lower courts, which relied on Chevron’s decision to uphold the regulation.

The justices were hearing two cases in the same case because Jackson was recused from the New Jersey case, which she had previously participated in when she was an appellate judge. The full court heard the Rhode Island case.

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The article has been corrected to indicate that the judge’s surname is Ketanji, not Kentanji.

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