Quote:
The Supreme Court on Friday [June 28, 2024] cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely [only] on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws.
By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave rise to the doctrine known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable. But in a 35-page ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices rejected that doctrine, calling it “fundamentally misguided”.
Justice Clarence Thomas penned a brief concurring opinion in which he emphasized that the Chevron doctrine was inconsistent not only with the Administrative Procedure Act but also with the Constitution’s division of power among the three branches of government. The Chevron doctrine, he argued, requires judges to give up their constitutional power to exercise their independent judgment, and it allows the executive branch to “exercise powers not given to it”.
Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a longer (33-page) concurring opinion in which he emphasized that “Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretative rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding. … All today’s decision means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.”
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Comment:
The ruling is of prime importance. It considerably reduces the tyrannous power of the deep state.
No wonder the three Leftist justices dissented. The Left is all about preserving, expanding, and augmenting government power. The deep state is the Left in power. May it wither away!