Josh Hetzler, Legal Counsel
Wednesday, July 3, 2024
Presidential immunity, the FDA's abortion pill approval, January 6 prosecutions - the U.S. Supreme Court recently handed down major decisions on all these issues and more. But arguably the most earth-shaking and consequential of them all was the Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the court overturned 40 years of bad precedent that had allowed the administrative agencies (i.e. unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats) to effectively grow into a 4th branch of government.
This case represents a major win for the Constitution and will help significantly reign in the bloated federal government agencies, which in many ways have essentially replaced Congress and the Courts in their rule-making and enforcement powers.
The issue stemmed out of a 1984 Supreme Court case known as Chevron, from which we got the "Chevron deference" doctrine. Basically, that Court held that when any part of a statute passed by Congress was "ambiguous", the regulatory body over that part of the law must be given deference by the courts in how they interpret and enforce that law against individuals and businesses. In other words, the power was taken out of the hands of the judicial branch to properly interpret the meaning of many of the laws passed by Congress.
But in a landmark 6-3 decision, the Court in Loper reversed Chevron! The Court held: "The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled."
The Court reasoned: "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron's presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment."
So what will this ruling mean going forward? Well, a lot of things. For starters, it will mean a lot more lawsuits by Americans whose rights have been infringed by the whims of unelected bureaucrats. It will also require Congress to do its job by passing laws that a more clear, rather than relying on the executive agencies to sort it all out. And in turn, this should begin to reduce the expansive reach of the administrative state, which has severely disfigured our constitutional republic.
At this point, we can only imagine all the ways in which the regulatory agencies of the federal government will be put in check. But among them, it could impact issues like the Biden administration's recent regulations on Title IX that push "transgenderism" into every public school and seek to force boys into girls' bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Since all that was done under the guise of the term "sex" supposedly meaning something other than male or female in the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress, presumably the courts have more power to overrule the Department of Education's ideological power grab.
It will take a while for the consequences of this case to fully work their way through the myriad issues at stake in our nation, but this decision is a major and critical step in getting us back on track.
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