Today, the Supreme Court released a major ruling that undermines the government’s ability to enforce important regulations—and ultimately, to govern.
In response to Loper v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, SCOTUS overturned the long-standing Chevron precedent that courts must defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Historically, policy experts, not judges and lawyers, have been entrusted to make nuanced decisions on how to enforce rules and regulations.
“The decision entrenches the power of the courts while weakening the functionality of administrative agencies,” says Shahrzad Shams, senior manager of Roosevelt’s Race and Democracy program. “This further opens the door to regulatory capture and corporate disregard for the health, safety, and well-being of people and the planet.”
Two additional decisions this week also stifled regulators’ ability to regulate: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) v. Jarkesy and Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The SEC decision—by finding that the SEC’s process for adjudicating fraud claims violates the Seventh Amendment—upends decades of precedent and practice, and by doing so, could also strip several other federal agencies of their power to seek penalties in administrative proceedings. In Ohio, the court blocked the EPA’s rule requiring states to adequately plan to reduce ozone pollution that impacts other states, a loss for public health and environmental justice.
Through judicial overreach into policy questions—as we also saw in the Supreme Court’s choice to hear Moore v. US—SCOTUS is pursuing an “explicitly political project” that seeks to “construct a (de)regulatory landscape that entrenches permanent, elitist minority rule,” says Shams.
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