WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 40-year-old decision that had made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections, handing business interests a sweeping and potentially lucrative victory.
The court’s six conservative justices overturned the 1984 decision, popularly known as the Chevron ruling, which had long been a target of conservatives. The liberal justices disagreed.
Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in the litigation that could be triggered by the Supreme Court ruling. The Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer had warned that such a move would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.”
The essence of the Chevron decision is that when laws aren’t crystal clear, federal agencies should be allowed to work out the details. Opponents of the decision argued that it gives experts working for the government power that should be held by judges.
“The courts must use their independent judgment to determine whether an agency has acted within the scope of its legal authority,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
Roberts wrote that the decision does not overturn previous cases that relied on the Chevron decision.
But Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion that this assurance rang hollow. “The majority is confident, I am not so confident,” she wrote.
Kagan called the latest decision “another example of the Court’s determination to limit agency powers despite congressional instructions to the contrary.”
The court ruled in cases where Atlantic herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island had challenged a fee requirement. Lower courts used the Chevron decision to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule requiring herring fishermen to pay for state-mandated observers to log their catch.
The fishermen’s appeals were strongly supported by conservative circles and the business community, who were betting that a court newly formed during the presidency of Republican Donald Trump would deal another blow to the regulatory state.
The court’s conservative majority has previously restricted environmental protection regulations and stopped the Democratic Biden administration’s initiatives on Covid-19 vaccines and student loan forgiveness.
The justices had not invoked the Chevron Act since 2016, but lower courts continued to do so.
Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-0 majority, with three justices dissenting, that judges should play a constrained, deferential role in evaluating the actions of agency experts in a case brought by environmental groups challenging the Reagan administration’s efforts to loosen regulation of power plants and factories.
“Judges are not experts in their field and are not members of any political power,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 1984, explaining why their role should be constrained.
But the current Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has become increasingly skeptical of federal agency powers. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all questioned the Chevron decision.
Together with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, they formed the majority on Friday.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan’s dissent.
Opponents of the Chevron doctrine argue that judges too often apply it to rubber-stamp decisions made by government bureaucrats. Judges must apply their own authority and judgment to determine what is law, the court said Friday, adopting the opponents’ argument.
Bill Bright, a Cape May, New Jersey, fisherman who was involved in the lawsuit, said the decision to overturn Chevron would aid fishing companies make a living. “Nothing is more important than protecting the livelihoods of our families and crews,” Bright said in a statement.
President Joe Biden’s administration defended the rulings upholding the charges, saying that overturning the Chevron decision would be a “convulsive shock” to the legal system.
Environmental and health groups, civil rights organizations, labor unions and Democrats at the national and state levels had asked the court to leave the Chevron decision in place.
“The Supreme Court is pushing the nation into uncharted waters by stripping power from our elected branches of government to advance its deregulation agenda,” Sambhav Sankar, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice, said after the ruling. “The conservative justices 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 pursuit of profits. This ruling threatens the legitimacy of hundreds of regulations that keep us safe, protect our homes and our environment, and level the playing field for business.”
Business groups supporting the fishermen included gun, e-cigarette, agricultural, lumber and housing associations. Conservative interests, which also recently intervened before the Supreme Court to limit air and water pollution regulation, also supported the fishermen.
The fisherman sued against the 2020 ordinance that would have authorized a fee of over $700 per day that no one ever had to pay.
In separate lawsuits in New Jersey and Rhode Island, the fishermen argued that Congress never gave federal regulators the authority to require fishermen to pay monitors. They lost in lower courts, which relied on the Chevron decision to uphold the regulation.
The justices heard two cases on the same issue because Jackson was disqualified from the New Jersey case, which she had previously participated in as an appellate judge. The entire court was involved in the Rhode Island case.
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This story has been corrected to show that the judge’s name is spelled Ketanji, not Kentanji.
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