Supreme Court Pares Back Federal Regulatory Power
The Supreme Court upended the federal regulatory framework in place for 40 years, expanding the power of federal judges to second-guess agency decisions over environmental, consumer and workplace safety policy, among other areas. The 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, discards a 1984 precedent directing federal courts to defer to agency legal interpretations when the statutory language passed by Congress is ambiguous. Conservative legal activists, Republican-led states and some business groups have argued in recent years that the 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, allows agenda-driven regulators to push the limits of their power. By abandoning the doctrine called Chevron deference, the justices have given parties unhappy with agency decisions more opportunities to overturn regulations by persuading federal judges that agency officials exceeded their authority. Even before the decision, the conservative-dominated court had been hammering away at federal regulatory power, in opinions that threw out Biden administration policies ranging from public-health measures to contain Covid-19 to a blanket cancellation of student-loan debt. But while the Supreme Court hasn’t cited Chevron for authority in years, many lower courts said they remained bound by the doctrine as long as it remained on the books. A who’s-who of industry associations and conservative advocacy groups that regularly sue federal agencies have filed many briefs urging the justices to abandon or roll back the decades of deference given to regulators. The decision brings the Chevron precedent full circle. Conservatives initially hailed the Chevron decision, which required the then-liberal leaning federal judiciary to defer to Reagan administration policies rolling back environmental protections. Over subsequent decades, however, the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden used regulatory tools to advance their agendas in the face of congressional gridlock. With Congress often passing vaguely worded legislation, the Chevron doctrine limited judges from second-guessing regulators’ application of ambiguous provisions except when manifestly unreasonable.
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