Supreme Court Chevron Decision Explained: Why It Matters
CQ Roll Call
Nothing screams Hot Girl Summer like poolside BBQs, Pride parades, and the downfall of the administrative state.
As we are all painfully aware, the Supreme Court has handed down its last decisions for the summer. The nation’s highest court made it harder to challenge racial gerrymandering, punished homeless people for existing, opened the door to even more political corruption, and made it easier to commit mass shootings, among other rulings. A lot of the attention has, very rightfully, been on the Court’s decision to effectively dub Trump a king above the law. But this term has also been rife with terrible administrative law cases — the area of law that governs regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Court’s rulings in these cases directly further the conservative political movement’s efforts to make the United States an increasingly scary place to live.
The Court’s reactionary approach to administrative law cases is not surprising. What the conservative justices are trying to do is explicitly political: to construct a (de)regulatory landscape that dismantles what remains of FDR’s New Deal legacy and entrenches permanent, elitist minority rule. While each of the administrative law cases this term have a unique set of facts, contextual backgrounds, and legal and political implications, the Court’s decisions as a whole dictate how we’re able to fight back — and the kind of government that’s left for us, should we succeed.
But it’s safe to say it’s not looking great. The Court overruled the seminal Chevron decision in Loper Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. Chevron was a 1984 case that established that courts must defer to federal agencies when it comes to interpreting certain laws. This idea came to be known as Chevron deference, and, at least before this summer, was one of the most important administrative law principles.
Why was the Chevron case so important? And what can we expect now that it’s been overruled?
Chevron made logical sense; when Congress passes a law ordering agencies to take regulatory actions, such as ensuring our water is safe to drink or the air is clean to breathe, it’s simply not feasible for it to account for the ins and outs of the countless, highly technical issues that regularly come up for governmental agencies. After all, most members of Congress aren’t environmental scientists or agricultural specialists, so they write laws that are general and broad, and then pass the buck to regulatory agencies to fill in the gaps. Chevron gave agencies like the EPA — comprised of experts with specialized knowledge — rather than courts — made up of non-expert judges — the leeway to interpret the nitty-gritty of these mandates.
The Chevron principle has long been a major nuisance for some industry giants. Profit-hungry corporations have their sights set on whatever will make them the most money (even if it could mean harming people and the planet) and they regularly view regulations as an impediment to that goal. So they’ve backed business-friendly Republicans who have, in turn, packed the courts with conservative judges in line with their cause. Right-wing actors on and off the courts have worked hard to end Chevron deference, and in the last few years in particular, this Court has signaled its willingness to do away with it altogether. Last Friday, it did just that.
It’s hard to overstate just how big of a deal this decision is. It fundamentally reshapes how our government functions by shifting power away from regulatory agencies and to the judiciary. Judges, without any training in the countless fields the hundreds of existing federal agencies specialize in, will now get to be the main decision-makers when it comes to questions concerning our air quality, working conditions, food and drug safety, climate, nuclear energy, civil liberties, and water quality, to name just a sliver of the areas agencies exist to regulate. Uniformity in judicial decision-making will nose-dive, as judges with varying ideological commitments (and ties to big business) insert their individual views on a case-by-case basis. Corporations, as the ostensibly regulated entities, will likely generally be under less scrutiny and will therefore be able to exercise even greater control over our society, in accordance with whatever is best for their bottom lines. And to add fuel to fire, on Monday the Supreme Court handed down another administrative law case that effectively makes the Loper Bright decision retroactive, putting longstanding regulations at risk of being struck down. It’s all very bleak, to say the least.
What other regulatory decisions did the Court hand down this term?
The Loper Bright case landed just a day after the Court issued SEC v. Jarkesy — yet another decision that will hamper the enforcement powers of a whole host of federal agencies. On a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the conservative majority found that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s adjudication of fraud claims violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. In plain English: the SEC can no longer impose its own fines on individuals accused of securities fraud, and the implications of the decision extend well beyond the SEC, to many other regulatory agencies.
By way of background, many agencies often choose to use in-house administrative tribunals, rather than federal courts, to bring enforcement actions against actors they believe to be in violation of a given regulation. In fact, for some agencies, like the Department of Agriculture and the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, it’s not a choice at all — federal law states that they can only seek civil penalties via their own agency’s enforcement proceedings. Now, judges without experience handling these complex, technical policy issues will be able to determine the shape of our laws.
It’s not a very sexy topic, but the Court ruling that the SEC’s internal process violates the right to a jury trial is, in the words of Justice Sotomayor in her dissent, “a devastating blow to the manner in which our government functions.” It will likely hamper the enforcement abilities of agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Federal Trade Commission, to name a few. And for those agencies that, under federal law, can only pursue civil penalties in agency enforcement proceedings…well, too bad for you, I guess.
But wait, there’s more! The Court also made it harder to regulate air pollution last week, striking yet another blow, after several other recent attacks, to the EPA’s ability to function. The 5-4 majority in Ohio v. EPA halted the EPA’s “good neighbor plan,” a provision of the Clean Air Act that sought to decrease pollution across states. Because of wind patterns, some East Coast states, dubbed “downwind states,” were bearing the brunt of ozone pollution emitted by so-called “upwind states” in the West and Midwest. The good neighbor plan required industrial polluters in upwind states to reduce their emissions so as to decrease the risk of lung cancer, asthma, and other negative health and environmental effects of pollution on downwind states. But the Court said, “No thank you,” and put a stop to the good neighbor plan.
Why do we need to care about these cases?
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds, especially in administrative law cases, because they are just inherently boring. Sure, it’s important to pay attention to the Court’s reasoning in its decisions because that will inform the legal strategies we are forced to lean on in the immediate term. But it’s crucial that we not get lost in or distracted by technical legal arguments, and focus on the throughline of these and other recent administrative law decisions: The Court is entrenching its own power, in pursuit of a far-right agenda that centers, in part, the dismantling of regulatory agencies in service of corporate greed.
Some liberals will push back on this argument and point out the “good” things that Court did this term, once again showcasing liberals’ inability to understand how power works. Sure, there have been some cases this term that haven’t gone as horribly as they could have. To which I say, just how far to the right are we willing to move the goalposts? We might be able to take a sigh of relief when SCOTUS doesn’t actively roll back our rights, but why on earth should we celebrate decisions that merely uphold the status quo? We don’t need to defend this institution because some of its rulings could technically be worse. Besides, in several other major decisions this term, the Court has left the door open for these challenges to be brought again sometime in the future — I don’t know, say, after November 2024?
I’m once again begging Democrats to see and swiftly act on the reality that what the Court is, and has been doing, is an explicitly political project. Regardless of the legal technicalities it devises or draws on to give the illusion of legitimacy, the decisions themselves are in service of the right’s goal to create a society, economy, and political system that entrenches rule by the wealthy and powerful few. Any conversation we have about the Court and the rulings it hands down has to be anchored in this understanding.
If Democrats decide to return from lunch sometime soon and take meaningful action to rein SCOTUS in, they’ll have to grapple with the reality of a no-holds-barred Court. While the response could look like expanding the number of seats on the court or requiring a supermajority of justices to agree before overturning federal law, it damn well better look like something.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
