Overturning of Chevron Deference
One of the biggest court cases of the century and it is only 2024. This will set back the ability to tackle all of our problems in the 21st century.
Chevron deference is the latitude federal judges give agencies over how to interpret the statutes they administer when a dispute arises. First, the judges examine the wording and the context of the statute in question to see if Congress's intent is clear. If it is, then the matter is settled: The agency is obliged to follow the letter of the law.
But if it is ambiguous the reviewing court must defer to the agency's choice in how to carry out the law. The idea behind such deference is that expert agencies, accountable to an elected president, are better suited than federal judges to make the policy choices that Congress left open.
The supreme court overturned Chevron deference and cited that judges will be ruling over when ambiguous text is subjected to lawsuits.
Policymakers intentionally leave ambitious text because it is impossible to write down every specific detail on how to handle every specific scenario.
Here are some examples:
- FAA is tasked to regulate airplanes to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.”. This type of sentence is now ambiguous.
- FDA regulates “biological products,” including “proteins. Judges will now need to answer “When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”?
- Under the Medicare program, reimbursements to hospitals are adjusted to reflect “differences in hospital wage levels” across “geographic areas”. Judges will now need to define geographic areas instead of the Department of Health utilizing data to determine the best way to categorize the areas.
- EPA enforces PFAS levels. There are 7 million different chains of PFAS, a company could find something similar to PFAS and the EPA will now be without power to enforce that new chemical without congress approval.
In an ideal world, laws should be specific but that's impossible in our fast, imperfect, moving world where our laws are basically written in stone that are impossible to change with the two party system.
Policymakers intentionally leave ambitious text because it is impossible to write down every specific detail on how to handle every specific scenario.
The Court is now the final word on a broad range of policy questions that hardly anyone cares about, but that are very important when taken in the aggregate, and that often involve hyper-technical questions that are far beyond the justices' expertise.
This opens the floodgates for corporations to bug down our judicial system and our ability to enforce regulations that converted our acid rain from the 1980s into something of the past.
Your vote can alter the supreme court.