SUPREME COURT PARES BACK FEDERAL REGULATORY POWER:
The Supreme Court upended the federal regulatory framework in place for 40 years, expanding the power of federal judges to second-guess agency decisions over environmental, consumer and workplace safety policy, among other areas.
The 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, discards a 1984 precedent directing federal courts to defer to agency legal interpretations when the statutory language passed by Congress is ambiguous. Conservative legal activists, Republican-led states and some business groups have argued in recent years that the 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, allows agenda-driven regulators to push the limits of their power.
By abandoning the doctrine called Chevron deference, the justices have given parties unhappy with agency decisions more opportunities to overturn regulations by persuading federal judges that agency officials exceeded their authority.
Even before the decision, the conservative-dominated court had been hammering away at federal regulatory power, in opinions that threw out Biden administration policies ranging from public-health measures to contain Covid-19 to a blanket cancellation of student-loan debt. But while the Supreme Court hasn’t cited Chevron for authority in years, many lower courts said they remained bound by the doctrine as long as it remained on the books.
And: SCOTUS Hands Down Huge Decision Affecting J6 Defendants. “The Supreme Court has taken a judicial katana to a statute that federal prosecutors weaponized to go after those who participated in the January 6 incident. The question before the court was whether the ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’ statute could be used in how the Justice Department weaponized it to go after hundreds of January 6 defendants. As SCOTUS Blog covered in April, the plaintiff, Joseph Fischer, a former police officer, argued that the statute only pertained to evidence tampering in a congressional investigation. During oral arguments, justices weren’t convinced by the government’s interpretation, arguing that it could cast too much of a net.