“…It’s time for the Supreme Court to jettison the doctrine known as Chevron deference, which forces federal courts to surrender their judicial function to the unaccountable bureaucrats of the administrative state.
This past January, the high court heard arguments in two cases—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Commerce Department—that present the opportunity to do just that. A decision in these cases is expected by June.
Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution vests the “judicial Power of the United States” in “one supreme Court” and “such inferior Courts as the Congress may … establish.” As this language makes clear, the Supreme Court is the head of the judicial branch of our federal government. It sits atop the judiciary and superintends the decision-making of lower courts through the opinions it hands down.
The Chevron line of cases is an exercise of the Supreme Court’s superintending role over the judicial branch. It is a set of instructions to the lower courts about how they are to exercise their judicial function when reviewing agency actions that involve formal interpretations of a statute the agency is charged with administering.
Under Chevron, the courts are told to defer to the agency’s interpretation if the part of the statute at issue has more than one plausible reading, even if the court believes there’s a better interpretation that’s more faithful to the statute Congress enacted.
Right away we notice something strange about this instruction: In its unanimous 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court is telling the lower courts to abdicate a portion of their judicial power—to cede it to administrative agencies…”
