The Supreme Court has overturned the 1984 decision in Chevron v.
Natural Resources Defense Council, which mandated judicial deference to
agencies in cases where the law is unclear.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) federal
rule requiring fishermen to pay $700 per day for an “at-sea monitor” is
outside the authority that Congress granted the federal agency,
according to the majority of the court in a 6-2 decision.
The justices heard the arguments in January in two cases arising from
lawsuits filed by Rhode Island and New Jersey fishermen opposing NOAA’s
rule, which they claim threatened to destroy their livelihoods.
The Chevron doctrine, a legal theory developed in the 1980s, states
that if a federal regulation is contested, the courts should accept the
agency’s reasonable interpretation of whether Congress gave it the right
to issue the rule, provided that Congress had not directly addressed
the issue. This theory was overruled by the court’s decision.
“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the
court’s majority. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in
deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as
the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive
Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute
delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits,
courts must respect the delegation while ensuring that the agency acts
within it.”
“But courts need not, and under the APA, they may not defer to an
agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous,”
he added. “Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to
disregard their statutory duties.”
“And the only way to ‘ensure that the law will not merely change
erratically but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,’”
he said, citing Vasquez v. Hillery, is “for us to leave Chevron
behind.”
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that Chevron deference “permits the Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it.”
“Chevron deference was ‘not a harmless transfer of power,'” Thomas
wrote. “‘The Constitution carefully imposes structural constraints on
all three branches, and the exercise of power free of those accompanying
restraints subverts the design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.’ In
particular, the Founders envisioned that ‘the courts [would] check the
executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.”
“Chevron was thus a fundamental disruption of our separation of
powers. It improperly strips courts of judicial power by simultaneously
increasing the power of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron, we
restore this aspect of our separation of powers,” he said.
The fishermen claimed that 20% of their revenue is lost due to the required expense of at-sea monitors.
Dissident from the majority, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor
stated that the Chevron “has formed the backdrop against which
Congress, courts, and agencies—as well as regulated parties and the
public—all have operated for decades. It has been applied in thousands
of judicial decisions.”
“It has become part of the warp and woof of modern government,
supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds—to name a few, keeping air
and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.
Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political
branch of the government,” Kagan wrote. “Those were the days when we
knew what we were not. When we knew that between courts and agencies,
Congress would usually think agencies were the better choice to resolve
the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes.”
“Because agencies are ‘experts in the field.’ And because they are
part of a political branch with a claim to making interstitial policy,
And because Congress has charged them, not us, with administering the
statutes containing the open questions,” she continued. “At its core,
Chevron is about respecting that allocation of responsibility—the
conferral of primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not
courts.”
Jerry Leeman, CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship
Association (NEFSA), praised the Friday decision, stating that “Federal
officials usually ignore the well-grounded concerns American fishermen
share about overregulation.”
“We are grateful to the Supreme Court for bucking this trend. And we
are especially grateful to the fishermen-plaintiffs in Relentless and
Loper Bright who have spent years fighting for their brother and sister
fishermen everywhere,” he added.
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