As patriotic revelers across the country prepare to celebrate our nation’s independence with barbecues and bomb pops, we’ll shoot off fireworks at the Mattox household to celebrate a different kind of independence: our national liberation from 40 years of overzealous, unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy.
In a big win for fans of the Constitution, the Chevron doctrine experiment has finally met its demise. Four decades ago, the Supreme Court granted the "administrative state," the collection of three- and four-letter government agencies and the hundreds of thousands of people they employ, expansive new power over our lives when it invented a new legal doctrine known as Chevron deference .
By requiring deference to the regulators’ legal interpretations of their own legal authority, the 1984 Supreme Court ruling shifted the balance of power toward unaccountable government agencies and away from taxpayers, citizens, workers, and business owners represented by their members of Congress.
In the following decades, the regulatory state became increasingly bloated, some agencies became “captured” by the large corporations they regulated, and small businesses were crushed, unable to keep up with the costs of complying with new and changing rules.
Enter a group of multigenerational New Jersey fishermen.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo began as a challenge to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s at-sea monitor program, which mandated that fishing boats host government monitors onboard to ensure compliance with federal rules. The law in question is the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a decades-old statute that requires certain fishermen to pay the monitor’s salary of around $700 per day . That fee could eat into a whopping 20% of a ship’s take-home pay. Refuse to pay and the fishermen would be banned from fishing altogether.
While the MSA explicitly requires certain fishermen to foot the bill for the monitors, Congress never mandated that small herring boats be subject to this requirement. In fact, because specific classes of boats were explicitly listed in the law but not these herring boats, it’s clear Congress did not intend for herring fishermen to be among the fishermen to pay for monitors.
But when NOAA ran low on money, it decided the herring fishermen were, in fact, responsible for paying for federal monitors. The Chevron doctrine empowered NOAA to pivot to an overly broad interpretation of the MSA. Despite the narratives you may have heard, it was small businesses such as Loper Bright Enterprises that stood to lose the most from this unilateral expansion of agency power.
After decades, and in many cases generations, of these fishermen doing their best to build their businesses and abide by the rules of the road, the federal agencies turned around and changed the rules on them. These salty, apolitical herring fishermen decided they were sick of being yanked around by faceless, unelected federal bureaucrats. By standing up for their businesses, the fishermen have become modern American folk heroes, taking on Goliath for millions of citizens and business owners across countless industries.
But before the Supreme Court even issued its decision in Loper, politically motivated activists began preemptively levying attacks designed to undermine any ruling that would roll back or overturn Chevron. The hyperventilating big government alarmists such as the Center for American Progress cried that the Loper fishermen were tools of a vast right-wing conspiracy to put people in danger and upend the regulatory process.
But it was, in fact, the government that made this case about Chevron, not the other way around. Critics say the decision will create regulatory instability, but, like the fishermen, farmers have decried the “messy effects and uncertainty” created by Chevron. And if you’re concerned about defending our democratic republic, taking decisions out of the hands of elected officials and placing them in the hands of unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats is a strange way to show it.
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The Supreme Court is simply restoring the checks and balances system vital to our democracy. It reaffirms that government agencies cannot rewrite or reinterpret the rules, almost always in a way that expands government power while burdening everyone else. Lawmaking is the responsibility of Congress, and interpreting the law is the responsibility of the judiciary, not the executive branch.
This week marks the beginning of the post-Chevron era. Now comes the hard part. Congress must do its duty rather than kick the can back to the agencies or the courts. That means clearer laws, more specificity, and more compromise. It also means we the people must take up our responsibility to hold members of Congress accountable for their job of lawmaking and elect those who are up to the task.
Casey Mattox is vice president for legal strategy at Stand Together.
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