US supreme court strikes down 40-year precedent, reducing power of federal agencies

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Conservative bloc

• Alito – Majority

• Barrett – Majority

• Gorsuch – Majority

• Kavanaugh – Majority

• Roberts – Majority

• Thomas – Majority

Liberal bloc

• Jackson – Minority

• Kagan – Minority

• Sotomayor – Minority

The US supreme court has overturned one of its own most important precedents, the Chevron doctrine, that for the past 40 years has guided the work of federal government in critical areas of public life, from food and drug safety to environmental protection.

In a ruling that the Biden administration has warned could have a “convulsive” impact on the functioning of government, the court’s hardline conservative majority delivered a major blow to the regulatory powers of federal agencies. Voting as a block, the six rightwing justices who wield the supermajority threw out the supreme court’s own 1984 opinion in Chevron USA Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, which has required the courts to defer to the knowledge of government experts in their reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws.

Writing the opinion, chief justice John Roberts bluntly stated that the Chevron precedent “is overruled”. He lambasted the legal theory laid out in the ruling, claiming it “gravely erred” and calling it was “misguided” and “unworkable” despite the fact that it has steered the functions of the federal government for four decades.

Roberts not only eradicated the Chevron doctrine, he turned it on its head. Under his ruling, the relationship between courts and federal agencies is reversed: in the modern era, the courts have shown deference to the expertise of agencies, but from now on the courts alone will decide.

“The constitution assigns to the federal judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate cases and controversies,” Roberts wrote. “Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

In recent years, the Chevron doctrine has become a central target of rightwing groups that blame it for what they see as a proliferation of government regulations executed by unelected bureaucrats in the so-called “deep state”. A key group behind the supreme court challenge, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, was founded with seed money from the oil billionaire Charles Koch.

In a raft of amicus briefs to the court, alliances of scientists, environmentalists and labor organizations warned that undoing Chevron would roll back a regulatory framework that for four decades has improved the health, safety and welfare of Americans. It would also unravel efforts to protect the environment and fight the climate crisis.

Elena Kagan issued a withering dissent, which was joined by her fellow liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She accused her rightwing peers on the bench of throwing out a precedent that had stood for 40 years as “a cornerstone of administrative law”.

Chevron had been applied over that period in thousands of judicial decisions and become “part of the warp and woof of modern government”, said Kagan. By casting out decades of settled law, the conservative supermajority had once again asserted their authority.

“The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Kagan added.

The ruling was widely denounced by liberal observers. Elizabeth Warren, the US senator from Massachusetts, said it was a “power grab by the far right to benefit the wealthy and well-connected”.

Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard law school, said on social media: “The administrative state just died. The imperial judiciary” has “relegated Congress to a secondary role”.

The decision was delivered in two combined cases, Relentless Inc v Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo. The cases were hung on a complaint from fishing companies over charges they were required to pay to cover the costs of conservation monitoring.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency, required fishing boat owners to pay $710 a day – a demand that the fishing companies argued was an overreach of federal agency power.