Supreme Court Deals Biggest Blow in 80 Years to Administrative State

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WASHINGTON, DC – Federal agencies suffered a massive blow to their regulatory power on Friday, when the Supreme Court overruled Chevron, a case under which federal courts have deferred for decades to agency interpretations of the laws they enforce.

As Chief Justice John Roberts began in his majority opinion, if a court determines that a federal law “is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue at hand, the court must, at Chevron’s second step, defer to the agency’s interpretation if it is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

“Cognizant of the limits of human language and foresight, [those who wrote the Constitution] anticipated that all new laws,” Roberts explained, “though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, would be more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning was settled by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”

“The Framers also envisioned that the final interpretation of the laws would be the proper and peculiar province of the courts,” the 6-3 opinion continued. “In the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall famously declared that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

“The views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it,” Roberts observed. “Otherwise, judicial judgment would not be independent at all.” more