Supreme Court overturns decades-old Chevron decision, undermining federal regulators

The U.S. 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 justices overturned the 1984 decision, commonly known as Chevron, which had long been a target of conservatives. The liberal justices 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.”

The gist of the Chevron decision is that federal agencies should be able to provide specific information when the law isn’t crystal clear. Opponents of the decision argued that it transferred authority 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 overturn prior 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 “yet another example of the Court deciding to roll back agency authority despite Congress’s recommendations to the contrary.”

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 requires herring fishermen to pay government-appointed observers to track their fish catch.

Conservatives and business leaders have strongly backed 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 curtailed environmental regulations and held back the Democratic Biden administration’s initiatives on Covid-19 vaccines and student loan forgiveness.

Justices have not cited Chevron since 2016, but lower courts have 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, nor do they belong to any political branch 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 federal agencies’ authority. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all questioned the Chevron decision.

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

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

Opponents of the Chevron Doctrine say judges have too often applied it to 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 involved in the lawsuit, said the decision to flip Chevron would help fishing companies make a living. “There is nothing more important than protecting the livelihoods of our families and crews,” Bright said in a statement.

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

Environmental and health groups, 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 nation into uncharted waters by seizing power from our elected government bodies to advance its deregulatory agenda,” Sambhav Sankar, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice, said after the ruling. “Conservative judges 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 challenge regulations in search of profits. This ruling threatens the legality of hundreds of laws that keep us safe, protect our homes and the environment, and create a level playing field for companies to compete.”

Business groups supporting the fishermen included gun, e-cigarette, farm, timber and home building groups. Conservative interests, which also intervened in recent Supreme Court cases limiting air and water pollution regulations, also backed the fishermen.

Rybak has filed a lawsuit challenging a 2020 ordinance that would have allowed a fee of up to $700 a day, although 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 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. She participated in it at an earlier stage, when she was an appellate court judge. The full court participated in the Rhode Island case.