SCOTUS 22-451: 6-3 Concurring

Are vague and broad powers to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats Unconstitutional?

Today’s decision fixes the decades-long error of handing vague and broad powers to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats [Chevron principle]. The Supreme Court's decision restores the Constitutional power to write the law to where it should be—with the elected representatives of the American people.

~ Jim Jordan, House Judiciary Committee Chairman (R-OH)

Facts of the Case

A group of commercial fishermen who regularly participate in the Atlantic herring fishery sued the National Marine Fisheries Service after the Service promulgated a rule that required industry to fund at-sea monitoring programs at an estimated cost of $710 per day. The fisherman argued that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 [Federal Register | archive] did not authorize the Service to create industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the Service failed to follow proper rulemaking procedure.

The district court granted summary judgment for the government based on its reasonable interpretation of its authority and its adoption of the rule through the required notice-and-comment procedure. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed.

Question

1. Does the Magnuson-Stevens Act authorize the National Marine Fisheries Service to promulgate a rule that would require industry to pay for at-sea monitoring programs?

2. Should the Court overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council or at least clarify whether statutory silence on controversial powers creates an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency?

Syllabus

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES ET AL. v. RAIMONDO,

SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

No. 22–451. Argued January 17, 2024—Decided June 28, 2024*

Opinion of the Court Delivered By Roberts

The dissent ends by quoting Chevron [Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837 (1984)]: “‘Judges are not experts in the field.’” Post, at 31 (quoting 467 U. S., at 865). That depends, of course, on what the “field” is. If it is legal interpretation, that has been, “emphatically,” “the province and duty of the judicial department” for at least 221 years. Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 177. The rest of the dissent’s selected epigraph is that judges “‘are not part of either political branch.’” Post, at 31 (quoting Chevron, 467 U. S., at 865). Indeed. Judges have always been expected to apply their “judgment” independent of the political branches when interpreting the laws those branches enact. The Federalist No. 78, at 523. And one of those laws, the APA, bars judges from disregarding that responsibility just because an Executive Branch agency views a statute differently.

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

Because the D. C. and First Circuits relied on Chevron in deciding whether to uphold the Rule, their judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Thomas, Concurring

Chevron deference was “not a harmless transfer of power.” Baldwin, 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of THOMAS, J.) (slip op., at 3). “The Constitution carefully imposes structural constraints on all three branches, and the exercise of power free of those accompanying restraints subverts the design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.” Ibid. In particular, the Founders envisioned that “the courts [would] check the Executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 4). Chevron was thus a fundamental disruption of our separation of powers. It improperly strips courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the power of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron, we restore this aspect of our separation of powers. To safeguard individual liberty, “[s]tructure is everything.” A. Scalia, Foreword: The Importance of Structure in Constitutional Interpretation, 83 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1417, 1418 (2008). Although the Court finally ends our 40-year misadventure with Chevron deference, its more profound problems should not be overlooked. Regardless of what a statute says, the type of deference required by Chevron violates the Constitution.

Gorsuch, Concurring

(This) is Chevron’s story: A revolution masquerading as the status quo. And the defense of it follows the same course Justice Douglas described. Though our dissenting colleagues have not hesitated to question other precedents in the past, they today manifest what Justice Douglas called an “acute conservatism” for Chevron’s “startling” development, insisting that if this “coveted anchorage” is abandoned the heavens will fall. But the Nation managed to live with busy executive agencies of all sorts long before the Chevron revolution began to take shape in the mid1980s. And all today’s decision means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.

Proper respect for precedent does not begin to suggest otherwise. Instead, it counsels respect for the written law, adherence to consistent teachings over aberrations, and resistance to the temptation of treating our own stray remarks as if they were statutes. And each of those lessons points toward the same conclusion today: Chevron deference is inconsistent with the directions Congress gave us in the APA. It represents a grave anomaly when viewed against the sweep of historic judicial practice. The decision undermines core rule-of-law values ranging from the promise of fair notice to the promise of a fair hearing. Even on its own terms, it has proved unworkable and operated to undermine rather than advance reliance interests, often to the detriment of ordinary Americans. And from the start, the whole project has relied on the overaggressive use of snippets and stray remarks from an opinion that carried mixed messages. Stare decisis’s true lesson today is not that we are bound to respect Chevron’s “startling development,” but bound to inter it.

Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson Dissenting

Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the Government. — Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 865 (1984)

Those were the days, when we knew what we are not. When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congress would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because agencies are “experts in the field.” And because they are part of a political branch, with a claim to making interstitial policy. And because Congress has charged them, not us, with administering the statutes containing the open questions. At its core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation of responsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not courts.

Today, the majority does not respect that judgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power to make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.

And that claim requires disrespecting, too, this Court’s precedent. There are no special reasons, of the kind usually invoked for overturning precedent, to eliminate Chevron deference. And given Chevron’s pervasiveness, the decision to do so is likely to produce large-scale disruption. All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power and courts not enough. But shifting views about the worth of regulatory actors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone of administrative law. In that sense too, today’s majority has lost sight of its proper role.

And it is impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its treatment of precedent. As to the first, this very Term presents yet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary. See SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U. S. ___ (2024); see also supra, at 3. As to the second, just my own defenses of stare decisis—my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of settled law—by now fill a small volume. See Dobbs, 597 U. S., at 363–364 (joint opinion of Breyer, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ.); Edwards v. Vannoy, 593 U. S. 255, 296–297 (2021); Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S. 180, 207–208 (2019); Janus, 585 U. S., at 931–932. Once again, with respect, I dissent.