Supreme Court’s power grab exposes ordinary Americans to countless risks

In Chicago in 1906, Upton Sinclair described how meat packers would put out poisoned bread for rats, then the rats, poison, and meat would be wrapped in sausage and sold to unsuspecting customers at a time before there was any reliable government food inspection.

Before safety rules were introduced, workers were injured or killed in the workplace with alarming frequency.

In 2024, the entire world will face the possibility of the Earth overheating to the point of cataclysm, and as new threats are identified, new regulations will be needed to protect the globe.

Over the years, the government has made progress in protecting Americans. Congress wrote legislation to protect food safety, individual savings, the environment, the quality of medicines and consumer products, and many other issues that affect ordinary Americans.

But on Friday, by ruling 6-3 in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority showed it doesn’t care whether regulations will protect people in the future. Loper overturns the earlier Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council case, decided four decades ago in 1984.

“No special competences?” Really?

The idea behind the so-called Chevron Doctrine was that Congress couldn’t anticipate all the technicalities that might come up in enforcing a law—say, the Clean Water Rule. Experts at the agencies responsible for implementing the rule could decide what Congress intended, as long as those experts did so in a reasonable way. If an agency’s experts interpreted an ambiguous law in a reasonable way, the justices were to defer to the agency.

Now, under Loper, instead of tasking experts with all the technical, legal and scientific knowledge to rationally interpret the details of Congressional statutes, that task will fall to judges who cannot distinguish idarucizumab from ustekinumab in drug safety regulation cases.

How many judges understand all the ways oil and gas drilling can affect oceans and marine life? Or how to protect capital markets from the opaque schemes of financial pirates? Or what levels are too high for certain chemicals in the air, water or food?

As Justice Elena Kagan said in oral arguments, could you imagine leaving it to the justices to decide what is the best way to regulate the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence? Many of these judges have a background in criminal or corporate law. Can Congress write detailed laws quickly enough to keep up with such an industry without leaving some of the work to experts?

In a devastating dissent, Kagan said the court majority was turning into “the country’s administrative czar.”

Interestingly, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion in Loper Bright: “Chevron’s premise is flawed because agencies have no special authority to resolve statutory ambiguities. The courts do.”

Do courts have special powers? Has he thought about how the environmental opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, which was released Thursday, confused, according to Forbes, nitric oxide — the air pollutant at the heart of this case — with nitrous oxide, which is also known as “laughing gas”? Would a scientist or medical expert make such a mistake? This error was later corrected.

Now opponents of any regulations intended to help ordinary people will be able to block proposed regulations in courts for years.

“This is an incredibly significant decision,” Howard Learner, CEO and executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, told us. “It means that agencies will be stuck in an endless mire of litigation.”

Due to wide divisions in Congress in recent years, the executive branch has filled this gap with federal regulations.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh complained that this approach “puts shocks into the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in.” But doesn’t the overturning of long-standing and important precedents by unelected judges also cause shocks in the system? The Supreme Court’s erroneous ruling in the Loper case overturns 40 years of precedent. And let’s not even get started on the overturning of the half-century-old Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022, which some justices said was “set as a precedent” or an “important precedent” – until it wasn’t.

With the Loper decision, the court significantly usurps the authority of the legislative and executive branches, disrupting the separation of powers envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Super-rich people and special interests who have been pushing for the court to do such things may believe that this ruling could make them even richer. The rest of us have reason to fear for our safety in countless ways.

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