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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
For decades, unaccountable federal bureaucrats have exerted extraordinary powers over the day-to-day lives of the American people, including in such areas as healthcare, taxes, the workplace, housing, and the environment. This disturbing trend was exacerbated by a noxious Supreme Court precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine under which the courts were often required to defer to a regulatory agency’s interpretation of the statutes the agency was responsible for administering.
It made no difference if a reviewing court exercising its own independent judgment would have reached a different conclusion in its interpretation of a statute than the regulatory agency. The agency’s interpretation was what counted as long as it was “based on a permissible construction of the statute” – a vague standard that has allowed regulatory agencies wide latitude to act like quasi-courts.
No more. The misguided Chevron Doctrine has now been relegated to the dustbin of history. On June 28th, the Supreme Court announced its decision, by a 6-3 vote, that the regulatory agencies had been allowed to go too far in assuming the role that the Constitution assigns to the judicial branch of the federal government. The Supreme Court’s ruling returned the power to the courts to “say what the law is,” the words used by the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall in the landmark 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison to describe the judiciary’s function of judicial review. That is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they established the judiciary as the third independent branch of government.
The Supreme Court’s majority opinion concluded that the Chevron Doctrine violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s grant of authority to the federal courts to “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the Court’s majority opinion, wrote that:
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption [of court deference to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws] is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion emphasized the broader implications of overruling the Chevron Doctrine. “In doing so,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “the Court returns judges to interpretative rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding.”
This does not mean that each agency’s viewpoint on issues within its area of expertise will be ignored by the courts going forward. The agency’s opinions will be respected if they are persuasive, considering such factors as how close the agency’s initial interpretation is to the enactment of the statute at issue and the agency’s consistency in applying this interpretation thereafter. One problem with the Chevron Doctrine, Chief Justice Roberts explained, was that it “allows agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.”
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by her fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she predicted that the majority ruling “will cause a massive shock to the legal system.”
Hopefully, Justice Kagan will turn out to be right but not for the reasons she gives for defending the hugely expanded administrative state. For too long, the system of checks and balances and separation of powers designed by the Constitution’s Framers has been distorted beyond recognition, giving way to rule by unaccountable know-it-all technocrats.
The legal system needed the “massive” shock delivered by the Supreme Court to restore the checks and balances and separation of powers that are integral to America’s constitutional republic.
Now how about total reform of the ESA(Endangred Species Act)so the Greens cant use it to Block Hospitals over a Fly or Farming over a Lizard or Rat which would mean no more lawsuits by the the Center for Biological Diversity and the Seirra Club Legal Défense Fund and Earth Justice
A great decision. We need to drop the administrative state and get back to constitutional governance.
Calling it the “administrative state” is a euphemism for Fascism. I’ll never understand why here in America, people go out of their way to avoid being terse and blunt. In my way of thinking that’s deceitful and less than honest.
It’s par for the course though. A lot of people don’t like Trump because he often tends to be terse and blunt. I suppose being terse and blunt offends those people’s “delicate sensibilities.” Wussies.
That’s some good news, can we expand it to the UN bureaucracy? The EU bureaucracy?
The only think I’d like to see happen at the UN is a demolition crew show up to raze the entire building and what’s left sold for scrap. That would be the proper use of US tax payers dollars.
Bureaucrats have always attempted to expand their power. Rome had 250,000 people in the early 400’s. Most were crats. The taxes were used to pay them even as the empire shrank in the previous century. The Vandals finally took Africa Province and eliminated the taxes completely. The population dropped to around 20,000 and stayed there for 1,000 years. The crats will fight to your last dollar.
Those Americans who don’t believe that the alphabet soup Administrative State is a bureaucratic tyranny ought to pay heed to (of all people) Democ-rat senate leader Chuck Schumer as he trembled before government employees at the C.I.A., F.B.I., D.O.D. and so forth: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Obviously, such pusillanimous Deep State politicians serve the Administrative State’s permanent bureaucracy, not the people.
It would be helpful if the author would have explained what this so-called Chevron Doctrine hubub is all about. What is the contention with Chevron other than price gouging which was set off by the coup d’etat installing Joe Briben stopping oil and natural gas drilling and exploring that always sets up a national and global inflation!
How ironic that the SCrOTUS exceeds its own authority in order to “slap down” the other branches which exceed their authority. Meanwhile, both the DNC and the GOP maintain the charade, selling bread and peanuts to those hoi polloi who are happy being hood winked by the circus.