Around mid-January, The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments involving a legal challenge to the Chevron deference doctrine. According to The New York Times, the legal case arose resulting from an unfunded, federal mandate that New England herring fishermen have to provide space on their vessels for federal observers from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Consequently,
In an op-ed authored recently by author and CFACT policy adviser Paul Driessen, he points out that the Chevron legal standard allows courts to defer to federal agencies who, in turn, interpret vague legislation passed by Congress, essentially allowing bureaucracies (like the EPA) to literally act with license. Driessen says:
The "Chevron deference doctrine" holds that – when faced with regulations that are based on ambiguous, or nonexistent, statutory text – lower courts should always defer to administrative agencies' interpretations of the text, as long as the interpretations are "reasonable."
Chevron deference has let federal agencies expand their domain and control in hundreds of instances. Affected citizens often have little recourse, as long as the impact of an individual rule can be viewed as small and the agency interpretation as not patently unreasonable.
In those situations, the 2022 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA is of little help, because it only addresses "major questions," agency decisions that have "major" economic or political significance.
According to The Times, Supreme Court Justices, such as Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, hinted during oral arguments they were skeptical of the government powers resulting from the Chevron doctrine and UPI says that signals the Justices might inclined to overturn it. Consequently, environmentalist groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, are panicked since overturning Chevron will obviously make their efforts a lot harder (a good thing).
The Supreme Court took an important first step with their decision in the West Virginia vs. EPA case in rolling back federal agency power, and overturning the Chevron doctrine would be significant. For too long, members of Congress have skirted responsibility for their actions by passing vague legislation deferring to regulatory agencies to do the dirty work of enforcing rules Congressional representatives could not get enacted by the legislative process.
The case before the Supreme Court is worth watching since legal precedents, like the Chevron doctrine, have resulted in the rise of an administrative state who base their decisions on so-called experts who have little knowledge of the real world including the consequences of their regulations. Overturning Chevron would help force a political realignment back to reality.
PHOTO CREDIT: The U.S. Supreme Court building from the front. By Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16959908
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