Supreme Court strikes down Chevron doctrine, destroying federal environmental protections • Source New Mexico

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Last week, the Supreme Court threw the future of climate and environmental regulation in the United States into question, overturning decades of legal precedent that gave federal agencies the freedom to interpret regulations according to their expertise and scientific evidence.

The impact of the decision to repeal the Chevron rule will take several years to become clear, but it could lead to many more legal challenges to regulations by agencies like the EPA and the Interior Department, which play a huge role in combating climate change.

Federal courts have long relied on federal agencies to interpret unclear and unexplained rules. In 1984, a narrowly divided Supreme Court unanimously ruled that federal agencies have the final say on unclear rules, giving those agencies broad authority to make decisions without fear of judicial overreach.

In papers filed with the Supreme Court, the Biden administration said repealing the Chevron rule would be a “shock to the legal system.”

Environmental organizations also condemned the decision.

“Today’s ruling sidelines the role of agency expertise and instead shifts authority to judges who lack the expertise of agency staff who live and breathe the science, financial principles, and safety issues that federal agencies specialize in,” Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.

Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the decision “undermines basic protections for the American people at the behest of powerful polluters.”

Writing for the 6-3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its statutory authority.” He called the Chevron decision “a fundamental disruption of our separation of powers,” one that “unfairly strips courts of judicial authority while increasing the power of executive agencies.”

The current conservative Supreme Court no longer relies heavily on Chevron to decide large executive branch cases; Roberts noted during oral arguments in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, also this session, that it had been “14 or 16” years since the court issued a ruling citing the Chevron precedent. Instead, the court has established its own standard for evaluating regulation in several recent rulings. That standard, which the court’s conservative justices call the “principal questions doctrine,” prohibits agencies from making regulations on issues of “economic and political magnitude” without clear directives from Congress. The court has never defined what constitutes an issue of that magnitude, but it did invoke the “principal questions” test in a landmark 2022 case that limited the EPA’s authority to regulate. greenhouse gases.

Lower courts, however, continue to invoke the Chevron rule in many cases, and federal agencies win most of them: an analysis of more than 1,500 district court decisions from 2003 to 2013 found that courts applied Chevron in 77 percent of regulatory disputes, and agencies won significantly more cases than cases in which courts did not apply Chevron. The Interior Department, which handles a wide range of issues related to climate change, oil leasing, endangered species, and indigenous affairs, was one of the agencies that relied on Chevron the most.

The Biden administration and numerous legal advocates had urged the court to uphold the precedent, arguing that overturning it would create regulatory chaos as hundreds of plaintiffs filed lawsuits challenging the previous rule. In his decision, Roberts rejected the idea that the court’s decision to reject Chevron would trigger a flood of lawsuits challenging the previous rule, saying the decision should not overturn numerous previous cases that relied on the precedent.

“Rulings in these cases that specific agency actions are lawful — including the Clean Air Act ruling involving Chevron itself — remain subject to statutory provisions old decisions “despite the change in our interpretive methodology,” he wrote, referring to the legal principle that judges should leave in place most previous decisions.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan expressed skepticism of that claim, saying the majority was too “optimistic” about the impact of firing Chevron, arguing that the precedent helped keep “the air and water clean, the food and medicine safe, and the financial markets honest.” She accused the conservative bloc of trying to turn the Supreme Court “into the country’s administrative czar.”

“What’s at stake (in this decision) is whether courts will defer to agencies interpreting statutes,” said Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, “or whether courts will stop doing that and will be more likely to interpret statutes themselves, even when they are ambiguous, which means they may be in a position to make more policy choices.”

The main case at issue this year, Loper Bright, involved a National Marine Fisheries Service regulation that requires herring fishermen to pay for monitors on their boats. The underlying law in question requires monitors to sail boats and make sure fishermen don’t overfish, but it doesn’t say whether the government can require fishing companies to pay for them. A commercial fishing company represented by lawyers who have ties to the conservative organization of energy billionaire Charles Koch sued to overturn the monitor rule — and also asked the court to throw out Chevron’s standard altogether.

The original Chevron decision upheld an attempt to weaken environmental regulations, not strengthen them. Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency had sought to relax the standard for calculating air emissions from industrial facilities, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, sued, arguing that the EPA lacked the authority to offer a new interpretation of the Clean Air Act. NRDC won an initial victory, but Chevron appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which sided with Reagan’s EPA.

But over the past decade, many conservatives have come to believe that this precedent allows the executive branch to abuse its powers, and its repeal has become a rallying cry for many right-wing activists and lawyers.

“There is a sense that Chevron is pro-regulation,” Burger said. “And if you take away the deference and give power to the courts, the growing number of conservative judges in the federal court system will have more authority, and that will have a chilling effect on the agency.”

This article originally appeared in Grist magazine at https://grist.org/regulation/the-supreme-court-overturns-chevron-doctrine-gutting-federal-environmental-protections/.

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