Birds fly outside the US Supreme Court on the day judges issue orders in pending appeals in Washington, US, June 24, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
Republican lawmakers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the Supreme Court ruling On Friday, the so-called Chevron doctrine, which for four decades led judges to defer to how federal agencies interpreted a law if its language was unclear, was overturned.
Republican lawmakers said the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision overturned a precedent that they said had unfairly strengthened the power of unelected government officials.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said: “The Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to make laws.”
“After forty years of respect at Chevron, the Supreme Court today made clear that our system of government leaves no room for an unelected bureaucracy to co-opt this authority for itself,” McConnell said. “The days of federal agencies filling in the blanks in legislation are rightly over.”
And Suzanne Clark, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement: “Today's decision is an important change in direction that will contribute to a more predictable and stable regulatory environment.”
Clark added that the Supreme Court's previous Chevron rule “enabled each new presidential administration to advance their political agendas through flip-flopping rules and failed to provide consistent rules of the road for businesses to navigate, plan and investing in the future.”
Jeff Holmstead, an attorney at the law firm Bracewell who previously served as Air Office administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, predicted in a statement that the ruling “will certainly change the way agencies write regulations.”
Holmstead said that during the four decades in which the Chevron doctrine was in effect, agencies sometimes started “with a regulatory program in mind and then tried to come up with a plausible” interpretation of existing law to justify it, “hoping that the courts would find that it was 'permissible.'”
“Going forward, they're going to have to start with the statutory provisions and decide what Congress actually expects of them,” he said.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Fox News that the new decision in the case known as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is a “huge victory for the American people, constitutional government and the rule of law.”
“It’s a huge blow to the administrative state in Washington, D.C. No one elects bureaucrats to make these decisions,” Cotton said of the decision, which overturned the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling in a case known as Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
Protesters gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court as verdicts are delivered on June 28, 2024 in Washington, DC
Michael A. McCoy | Getty Images
Democrats, on the other hand, condemned the ruling, accusing the Supreme Court's conservative majority of seeking to strengthen its own authority.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said: “By overruling Chevron, the Trump MAGA Supreme Court has once again sided with powerful special interests and giant corporations against the middle class and American families.”
“Their hasty rush to overturn 40 years of precedent and impose their own radical positions is appalling,” Schumer said.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said, “Today’s decision is further proof that the far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court will throw aside any precedent it wants in its quest to expand its own power and that of its MAGA allies across the country.”
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO – the largest federation of labor unions in the US – warned of the ruling's implications for workers' rights agencies.
“Extremist politicians and their corporate allies have sought to undermine regulatory agencies for decades, and this disheartening decision is a huge gift to those same interests,” Shuler said in a statement. “Today, a right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court has undermined the federal government’s ability to ensure that the law is enforced and that working people are protected.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the ruling “deeply troubling” and said in a statement that President Joe Biden “has directed his legal team to work with the Department of Justice and other Department advisors to carefully review today's decision.”
