Conservatives on the Supreme Court gave liberals another reason to cry.
All hell is about to break loose in Washington.
And that’s because the Supreme Court wrecked Joe Biden with this bombshell ruling.
Supreme Court overrules Chevron deference
The administrative state grew in power thanks to Chevron deference.
This mid-1980s Supreme Court precedent held that the courts would defer to administrative agencies on their interpretations of the laws passed by Congress.
Effectively, what this meant was that Congress really didn’t need to write actual laws anymore.
Legislation just contained broad strokes and policy goals while leaving it up to the bureaucracy to figure out what it meant and how to implement the law.
That’s all done with.
“Chevron is overruled,” Roberts wrote for the majority in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
Administrative agencies are no longer in the business of settling disputes about statutory language, Roberts explained.
“Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires,” Roberts declared.
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Roberts continued.
“Courts do,” Roberts concluded.
Republicans celebrate the win
Overturning Chevron has been a long sought after goal of the Conservative Legal Movement.
Draining the Swamp starts with draining the power of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to essentially make law.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) declared that Loper is a “huge victory for the American people, constitutional government and the rule of law.”
“It’s a huge blow to the administrative state in Washington, D.C. No one elects bureaucrats to make these decisions,” Cotton added.
Democrats were furious that the leftist ideological foot soldiers who have burrowed themselves inside the government will lose their ability to rule over the American people by fiat.
“In overruling Chevron, the Trump MAGA Supreme Court has once again sided with powerful special interests and giant corporations against the middle class and American families,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer ranted.
“Their headlong rush to overturn 40 years of precedent and impose their own radical views is appalling,” Schumer added.
What this law now means is that if Congress wants the government to achieve a policy goal, it must spell out exactly how it intends to make it happen in legislation.
Real world effects
This decision puts much of the Biden agenda in jeopardy.
Congress never passed a law expressly allowing the President to unilaterally bail out student loan debt.
Much of the Green New Deal’s power plant and emission standards power grabs are also at risk since those depended entirely on administrative agencies interpreting laws passed by Congress.
Chevron cuts both ways, and it will make much of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 unfeasible.
But stripping away the power of administrative agencies to usurp the power of Congress to write laws will help reduce the size and scope of government.
