The Supreme Court's recent decisions could undo big Biden accomplishments

President Joe Biden executed one of the most sweeping progressive agendas on labor, climate change and “corporate greed” in recent decades — only to see the Supreme Court lay it so bare that a Kamala Harris victory may not protect large chunks of it.

A suite of Supreme Court rulings this summer freed up federal judges to freeze many regulations the president once campaigned on or enacted to get around a deeply divided Congress. In Texas, a federal judge blocked Biden’s ban on noncompete agreements for workers, and a judge in Mississippi stopped his discrimination protections in health care for transgender people. And an Ohio-based appeals court temporarily halted a policy preventing internet companies from throttling service.

Biden appointees have spent years writing rules to crack down on credit card late fees, require airlines to fork over cash refunds and make millions more people eligible for overtime pay while reining in polluting industries. But the future of those policies, along with the president’s unfinished business on student debt relief and artificial intelligence, are far less secure than they were just two months ago.

While having a successor from the same party long served as the simplest way for presidents to protect and continue their legacies, the high court has made it harder for Harris to defend Biden’s even if she bests former President Donald Trump. The court rulings, particularly one overturning the “ Chevron doctrine,” now make it more difficult for Harris to secure her own agenda — or even, in some cases, for Trump to cement his.

“It’s super-prone to being used and abused by both private parties and by courts, and judges themselves who have an ideological agenda,” said Mike Taylor, who worked in the Food and Drug Administration under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The high court’s decision to end Chevron , a 40-year legal precedent that limited how judges intervened in complex agency policymaking, was one of three recent rulings set to stymie Washington’s regulatory machinery. The conservative majority also virtually eliminated the statute of limitations for challenging federal regulations and dramatically shrunk the power of the internal judges some agencies use to enforce their rules.

Lower courts have already cited the trio of cases in dozens of decisions, according to the progressive legal group Democracy Forward. That combination means that even if Trump doesn’t win the presidency and the power to undo Biden’s work from the inside, trade groups and corporations now have a greater chance of knocking rules down from the outside.

Biden’s yearslong efforts to relieve student debt, create workplace accommodations for people who get abortions and establish discrimination protections for transgender students are all particularly vulnerable . Now Democrats worry that the rulings are creating a de facto conservative veto on what presidents can accomplish — in defiance of the court’s past willingness to defer to federal agencies that employ hundreds of policy experts.

“We have an extremist Supreme Court with a very political agenda that is willing to overturn decades of precedent,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the House Progressive Caucus chair, said in an interview. “It has changed the legal strategy.”

The White House and the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Conservative jurists’ were chipping away at federal agency power even before the Supreme Court overturned Chevron . Two years ago, the court ruled that regulations addressing “major questions” — a term it hasn’t precisely defined — need specific authorization from Congress.

And some justices already see themselves as experts: In the June Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks for semiautomatic weapons, Justice Clarence Thomas offered diagrams of firing mechanisms while disputing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ interpretation of the phrase “single function of the trigger.”

Some Democrats also believe the Supreme Court is more likely to do away with new power plant emission limits and fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, hallmark environmental wins of the Biden administration. And there are fears that lesser-known regulations like slaughterhouse line speeds meant to protect workers from injury and consumers from foodborne illnesses could face new challenges from well-resourced companies.

A few industries are already on the attack: Conservatives and financial groups have sued to dismantle a massive market surveillance system run by the Wall Street regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And another conservative group has brought a suit challenging the Agriculture Department’s conservation practices .

“Congress is going to have to be much more specific and focused and set boundaries on the legislative agenda so that the agencies have a clear idea of what they can and cannot do,” Dan Glickman, a Clinton-era Agriculture secretary, said in an interview.

Republicans certainly wield federal regulations to pursue their own ambitions, such as limiting immigration and access to abortion medication. But Democratic administrations have often stretched the meaning of decades-old laws to address modern challenges — particularly when faced with stalemates in Congress.

“Inherently, these kinds of limitations on the ability of the government to carry out these kinds of protections do impact Democratic priorities more than Republican priorities,” said Sharon Block, a National Labor Relations Board member during the Obama administration who is now a Harvard Law School professor.

Although Chevron eventually became a cornerstone of progressive policymaking, it began as a court loss in 1984 for the Natural Resources Defence Council, a green group arguing that Ronald Reagan’s environmental regulators were too business-friendly. NRDC’s position echoed many liberals’ complaints that federal agencies had become too cozy with industry.

Decades later, the parties have switched places: Republicans say the precedent protected out-of-control agencies and their unelected bureaucrats from accountability while Democratic presidents, including Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden utilized it to advance new regulations with less judicial second-guessing about Congress’ will.

Many Democrats say industry still wields too much power in Washington, but they also see the judiciary as a fast-growing threat to their agenda.

The shift has prompted lawmakers like Jayapal to pursue legislation to codify the deference judges were once told to grant agencies. First introduced in 2021, Jayapal has been planning for this moment, but her Stop Corporate Capture Act has stalled in Congress.

Still, some Republicans say that the new legal landscape restores the proper role of Congress and the courts, rather than signifying a radical reorientation of government power toward the judicial branch.

“It means [Congress] can't just coast, and they can't just shake their fists at the agencies and say, ‘Loper Bright , Loper Bright ’ as if that's going to suddenly change how our government operates,” Philip Wallach said at an event hosted by American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where he is a senior fellow, citing the court case that overturned Chevron . That decision, he added, doesn’t suddenly mean “the administrative state must just be on its heels.”

More than a dozen Republicans on Capitol Hill have formed a working group to formulate their strategy in the new legal environment and are planning legislation to codify the new post- Chevron regulatory reality.

The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson has previously said his administration “will not be deterred” from undoing Biden’s regulatory agenda “no matter how long it takes.”

Even with signature regulations in jeopardy, a large part of Biden’s record is locked in through the billions of dollars he secured for microchip manufacturing, renewable energy and vital infrastructure. Some progressives also believe that a critical part of Biden’s presidency the courts can’t roll back is how he shifted the political and rhetorical center of the Democratic Party to the left on issues like labor, climate change, gender identity and Wall Street. And after years of readily dismissing the idea, Biden called for a sweeping reorganization of the Supreme Court in July, a push Harris quickly embraced.

To Bilal Baydoun, director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive group that has successfully pushed Biden to challenge corporations, the court decision is a challenge for Democrats to overcome — not a reason to shrink from policymaking.

“On the one hand, I think it's a very destabilizing development,” he said. “On the other hand, I think Democrats are more emboldened, I think, to protect the mechanisms of governance that create a fairer, more just and more sustainable society."