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You probably missed this Supreme Court decision. It will change how government works.
By Dace Potas, USA TODAY,
1 day ago
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a seemingly innocuous case about fishing vessels that will reshape how our federal government balances power and is one of the most important steps in forcing Congress to become legislators again.
In this case, the National Marine Fisheries Service required a group of commercial fishermen to pay the wages of monitoring programs to ensure they were complying with conservation laws. The original statute did not specify that the wages must be paid by the government, so the government handed the fishermen an estimated cost of $710 per day . Friday's decision sends the fee issue back to the lower courts.
The precedent allowed executive agencies to wildly reinterpret laws in the case of any congressional ambiguity at the whim of whoever was in the White House.
Supreme Court decision should help reduce executive orders
As Chief Justice Roberts put it in his majority opinion Friday, "The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. Chevron gravely erred in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different just because an administrative interpretation is in play."
The result of this doctrine was congressional laziness, as lawmakers haphazardly left ambiguities in the law whenever they didn’t feel like answering contentious questions.
Conversely, it has led to an increase in executive power, allowing presidents to reinterpret these ambiguous statutes every time the White House shifts political parties.
Chevron was a unique misstep from many of the court's best minds
Conservative justices didn’t always feel that way. For non-court watchers, Chevron's deference has been in the crosshairs of conservative justices and legal scholars alike for years. This end point has been a dream of Justice Neil Gorsuch and one that Justice Clarence Thomas has inched toward despite having a vital role in the strengthening of Chevron.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia, whom many scholars credit with guiding many conservative justices' originalist philosophies, was once a defender of Chevron .
“The capacity of the Chevron approach to accept changes in agency interpretation ungrudgingly seems to me one of the strongest indications that the Chevron approach is correct,” Scalia wrote in a 1989 Duke Law Journal article.
Thomas, who wrote in concurrence of Friday’s opinion, once authored another opinion in a case called National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X , which significantly strengthened the deference under which federal courts defer to agency interpretations. Thomas has since urged the court to revisit his own decision, but until now no such concrete action had been taken.
In many ways, the court has become more disciplined on the separation of powers, even as it has ushered in a new generation (relative term) of conservative justices. Gorsuch, one of the court’s youngest, is often seen as the thought leader of the movement to realign Congress as legislators.
While Gorsuch highlighted in his concurring opinion that Chevron was already a zombie precedent at the Supreme Court, which has refused to apply the precedent since 2016 , solidifying its place in the dustbin of history impacts the way lower federal courts will read ambiguities in statutes.
While overturning precedents like Roe v. Wade have had a more visceral impact on the American public, this realignment with the Constitution should be the true legacy of the court’s current makeup.
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Now, the Supreme Court’s main challenge is operating in a time period when Congress is doing little to alleviate its workload. The greatest service that the nine justices on the nation's highest court can do for future generations is what they’ve done today: forcing the legislative branch to actually legislate.
While the court will undoubtedly be most remembered as the one that killed Roe v. Wade, I will remember it as the one that killed the administrative state. This isn't the be-all and end-all for congressional dysfunction, but it remains a significant step in the right direction.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.
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