https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdfThe Supreme Court has finally and formally struck down the decades long precedent of Chevron Doctrine, altering one of the biggest pillars of the American bureaucratic state
Chevron USA v NRDC of 1984 was the case that established federal courts must defer to any agency's interpretation of a law or statute without the court being allowed to make its own determination, so long as it first established congress had not ruled on the precise issue at stake, and an agency had a plausible interpretation. Even if the courts had read the statute differently. The argument stemmed from the premise that in highly technical language, specialized agencies are more uniquely suited to determine their own minutia than judges. Its also long been the boogeyman of libertarians and opponents of an expansive federal bureaucracy, as it effectively delegated control of substantial policy issues out of the hands of an elected congress who left them unresolved and out of the hands of contested courts and into a quagmire of executive agencies with fickle definitions often changing with each Republican vs Democratic president. The original case deal with a question of whether the phrase 'new stationary source of air pollution' in the Clean Air Act covered individual components and machines being added to a factory, or just an entire new factory development. The EPA originally interpreted the former, Ronald Reagan then had his EPA change it to the latter, and the lawsuit passed through a then circuit judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg up to the Supreme Court. John Paul Stevens wrote the unanimous decision establishing Chevron Doctrine, but at the time it wasn't seen as a significant precedent and took years of being repeatedly cited in thousands of decisions to become a landmark of federal law- one of the most important.
Loper Bright v Raimondo has now been decided in a 6-3 decision that tears it down. The supreme court holds that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to use their own judgment in deciding the appropriate determination of statutory language, wresting that back from the executive bureaucracy full stop- courts may not defer to agency interpretation simply because a statute is ambiguous, they must decide it themselves. They hold the principles of Hamilton's federalist papers and Marshall in Marbury v Madison: The intent that the courts shall be the final interpreters of laws, their proper and peculiar province and duty.
There are no less than 114 pages of opinion, concurrence and dissent, a real weighty tome only a wonk could appreciate. But this is as important as it is dry and as it was expected a decision.