Good day all. Today, June 28th, the Supreme Court has been releasing a number of decisions. One of these just blew the regulatory state right out of the water. In a 6-2 decision, the Chevron Deference has been overturned.
Now this is a bit arcane and very legalistic, and since I’m not a lawyer, I may make a few mistakes. The Chevron Deference was a ruling issued in 1984 that basically told the courts that when a law was not well written that the court should “Defer” to the judgment of the regulatory agency affected. Per that internet tome of great accuracy, Wikipedia:
Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that set forth the legal test for when U.S. federal courts must defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a law or statute. The decision articulated a doctrine known as “Chevron deference”. Chevron deference consisted of a two-part test that was deferential to government agencies: first, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, “whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”
Wikipedia goes into great detail and there are a number of sources. I recommend reading through it. Basically,
The Court said that when Congress passes a law that contains an ambiguity, the ambiguity may represent an implicit delegation of authority from Congress to the executive agency that implements the law. The Court explained that these delegations limit a federal court’s ability to review the agency’s interpretation of the law.
This decision basically unleashed the regulatory state we’re now suffering under. It has allowed, for all intents and purposes, the regulatory agencies to make and enforce laws bypassing the legislative branch. People who ran afoul of some arcane regulation have actually been jailed. Others have been financially ruined with little to no recourse to the courts thanks to that idiot decision. Now the Supreme Court has rectified that situation. Here are some of the details from Fox News:
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a group of fishermen who challenged a decades-old legal doctrine that they say gave the administrative state too much power over their business.
In a 6-2 ruling where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate, the court’s majority said the federal rule promulgated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requiring the fishermen to pay $700 a day for an “at-sea monitor” is out of the bounds Congress set for the federal agency.
The Fox story doesn’t say why Brown didn’t participate. However, if she had, it would have been a 6-3 decision since the Progressive wing of the Court has never done anything to reign in the Government.
The justices in January heard the arguments of two cases stemming from lawsuits brought by New Jersey fishermen and herring fishermen from Rhode Island challenging NOAA’s rule, which they say threatened to ruin their livelihoods.
Without question, forcing the boat owners to pay $700 a day for a complete waste of space would have bankrupted most of the boats. The actual details of the case can be found by gargling Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
The court’s decision overruled what is known as the Chevron doctrine — a legal theory established in the 1980s that says if a federal regulation is challenged, the courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation of whether Congress had granted it authority to issue the rule, as long as the agency’s interpretation is reasonable and Congress had not addressed the question directly.
What should have been done is that the court ruled in the opposite manner and forced Congress to fix their mess. Instead, the Court in 1984, (What an appropriate year for this), basically gave the regulatory agencies and the administration virtual carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with limited oversight. This is now over.
“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.
Now what does this actually mean? For starters the BATFE, (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), just got hammered and hard. Recently, the BATFE was told that they couldn’t regulate bump stocks as machine guns. For years, the bump stocks, which are useless toys great for wasting ammunition, were completely legal.
Then the BATFE decided that the were now regulated and that you had to register them and pay a $200 tax. They did the same thing with wrist braces. There was no authorization for this from Congress. They just did it. They have also been looking at other ways to basically strip people of their 2nd Amendment rights through regulation. Now they can’t.
Spread this across all the regulatory agencies, especially the EPA and Energy departments, and it basically guts their power. The regulatory state costs the American economy several trillion dollars, most of which is unnecessary, duplicative and of questionable constitutionality. They have just lost their ability to screw people over. Congress is now going to be forced to actually do their jobs and I expect the courts are going to be getting very busy soon. Hopefully the next Administration will also come in and nuke these agencies from orbit, just to make sure.
Thatisall
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