Last week proved destructive not merely to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign but also to the administrative state and Biden’s fellow Democrats’ exploit to control the country. Two Supreme Court decisions bookending Biden’s disastrous debate foretell a coming decade in which the judicial branch will work to dismantle the abusive power unconstitutionally seized by the alphabet soup of federal agencies born since the New Deal.
Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturning the Chevron doctrine represented the most obvious blow to the administrative state. The Chevron doctrine “require[d] courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute so long as the agency’s interpretation [was] ‘reasonable.’” Deference under Chevron was demanded even in cases where the agency’s view of the statute was not the best, so long as a court found it “reasonable.”
In practice, Chevron deference provided the administrative state a powerful tool to appropriate lawmaking authority from Congress, explaining why it has long been known as our “fourth branch” of government. By declaring statutory language ambiguous, federal agencies have, for years, succeeded in expanding their authority — and making laws in Congress’s stead.
The facts underlying the twin cases of Loper Bright and Relentless, wherein the high court overruled Chevron on Friday, provide a perfect example of the administrative abuse that follows a finding of ambiguity. Those cases both challenged the Department of Commerce’s rule that fisheries pay the salaries of monitors directed by the agency to travel aboard the boats during fishing trips. The daily cost of such monitors
