SCOTUS Strikes Down Chevron, and Other Rulings: Read Them For Yourself
Photo by Phil Roeder, CC BY 2.0
The Supreme Court has rulings regarding regulatory power, January 6th prosecutions, and “camping bans” aimed at the homeless.
From SCOTUSBlog:
Fischer v. United StatesIn City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the court rules that “camping ban” laws restricting the homeless from sleeping on public property do not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” and are therefore not prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Grants Pass v JohnsonThe court overrules its 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which held that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court rules 6-3 that courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.
LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES ET AL. v. RAIMONDOIn the case of a former Pennsylvania police officer who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Fischer v. United States, the court holds that to prove a violation of the law, the government must show that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so. The case is returned to the lower court to determine whether the indictment can still stand in light of this new and narrower interpretation.
Chief Justice Roberts announced that Monday will be the last day of the term, so Corner Post, NetChoice, and Trump immunity will be on tap for Monday Morning.
On the Twitters, Trumwill points out: MAYBE WE CAN HAVE FLAVORED VAPES AGAIN.
Grape-poprock-flavored nicotine. We don’t need Trump to MAGA.Report
Intriguing to me that they heard argument (and found against the agencies) on this and Jarksey, but poofed the FDA case for lack-of-standing.
Which, obviously the FDA case would have been a 9-0 slam, but hearing the argument would have been a strong statement that the Court considers the FDA’s authority legitimate, versus “well you can’t show this harmed you” (implying that someone who could show that might have a shot.)Report
I saw this and felt appropriately sympathetic:
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It is somewhat remarkable that SCOTUS, having caught the car on abortion, went ahead and caught another car.Report
I took Administrative Law pre-Chevron. It was probably bubbling up in the lower courts at the time, but it wasn’t on the radar. When it came down a couple of years later, nobody thought it was a big deal.
There were reasons for this. Courts are largely incompetent to parse out highly technical regulatory issues, and Congress can’t write statutes that cover everything that can come up with the level of detail needed to make that possible. Consequently, courts have always deferred to agency interpretations. (Before Chevron, there was something called Skidmore deference, which survives today and is broad and ill-defined enough to do a large percentage of the work that Chevron did.) That deference was somewhat wild-and-wooly and variable. Some judges, like Justice White, were Chevronists avant la lettre. Just how much deference other judges were prepared to show depended on things like the difficulty of the issue, the reputation of the agency (the SEC got more deference than the NLRB), and how big of a stretch from the statutory language the regulation was. Much like the way things were last week. Chevron was widely seen at the time as a modest tidying up of existing judicial practice using a handy, if not very result-driving, formula. In the medium to long run, Loper-Bright will, I predict, change how courts talk more than it will change what courts do. In the short run, some judges will run away with things and micromanage agency decisions largely when they don’t like what the agency does. Then there will be a case that will do to Loper-Bright what Rahimi seems to have done to Bruen and things will settle down.Report