The Supreme Court curbed the unmitigated power of federal agencies with a new landmark ruling delivered Friday.
In a 6-3 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court overturned a 40-year precedent that gave federal agencies broad authority to implement regulations under ambiguous language unless Congress had explicitly prohibited such rules. Chief Justice John Roberts, however, writing the majority opinion to overturn the 1984 precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, stated that “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
The 1984 Chevron doctrine established the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to enforce the Clean Air Act, allowing federal bureaucrats to read their own interpretations into what Congress authorized agencies to do. Justice Roberts wrote that the precedent gave bureaucratic agencies too much power and argued for the judiciary to step in, noting that the “Administrative Procedures Act requires courts to exercise independent judgment.”
“Courts, after all, routinely confront statutory ambiguities in cases having nothing to do with Chevron — cases that do not involve agency interpretations or delegations of authority,” Roberts wrote. “Of course, when faced with a statutory ambiguity in such a case, the ambiguity is not a delegation to anybody, and a court is not somehow relieved of its obligation to independently interpret the statute.”
“Courts in that situation do not throw up their hands because ‘Congress’s instructions have’ supposedly ‘run out,’ leaving a statutory ‘gap,’” the chief justice added. “Courts instead understand
