From Robert Reich, Jan. 16 (See counter-argument below that)

The US Supreme Court will hear Jan. 17 a challenge to something known as the “Chevron” Doctrine, established by the Court’s ruling in the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Chevron case held that whenever a law is unclear, the federal agencies charged with implementing it should be able to interpret it — not the federal courts.

This makes sense because unlike courts, federal agencies are staffed with scientists, researchers, and engineers — actual experts in the fields they’re regulating. 

I spent five years at the Federal Trade Commission, supervising a team of economists and policy analysts that advised commissioners on how best to protect consumers and attack monopolies.

But now, a pair of Supreme Court cases challenging the Chevron doctrine could strip federal agencies of this key role of interpreting and implementing our nation’s laws — and shift this power to the courts.

But here’s the problem, and it’s a huge one. If judges become the sole interpreters of the nation’s laws, a single rightwing judge, carefully selected by corporate plaintiffs, could invalidate all the regulations of a federal agency charged with protecting the public. 

No wonder big banks, fossil fuel companies, and pharmaceutical giants, who hate the power of federal agencies to limit their profits, have been trying for years to end the Chevron Doctrine. And no wonder the two cases the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow have been selected and bankrolled by the Koch network to do accomplish just this.

They think they have the votes on the Supreme Court to do it.

If agencies are stripped of their power to regulate, the big losers will be the American public. We need real experts tackling today’s complicated problems, not rightwing judges selected by corporate plaintiffs.

It’s important to see the potential fall of the Chevron Doctrine for what it is: a power grab by corporate interests, allowing them to shop for judges who will strip agencies of their power to protect the public.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/whats-the-chevron-doctrine-and-why?r=rbths&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=posthttps://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/whats-the-chevron-doctrine-and-why?r=rbths&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

The counter argument, indeed both arguments, are presented here:

In an article published in 2014, law professor Thomas Merrill suggested that the Chevron decision was not regarded as a particularly consequential one when it was issued. But in the decades since then, it became one of the most significant rulings on federal administrative law, cited by federal courts more than 18,000 times.

At the same time, Chevron has been a target for conservatives, who contend that courts – rather than federal agencies – should say what the law means. In recent years, some justices have urged their colleagues to revisit the doctrine, and the court itself has not cited Chevron since 2016. But the Supreme Court had repeatedly turned down petitions asking them to reconsider the Chevron doctrine – until last year, when it agreed to take up a case brought by a group of family-owned companies that fish for Atlantic herring.

…

By instructing courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as long as those interpretations are reasonable, Relentless tells the justices, the Chevron doctrine conflicts with the duty of judges under the Constitution to “apply their own independent judgment” – based on factors such as the text, history, and purpose of the law at issue, as well as the prior cases applying it – to determine what the best interpretation of the law is.

Chevron is also inconsistent with the plain text of the federal law governing administrative agencies, the fishing companies observe, “which makes clear that courts, not agencies, are supposed to interpret statutes.”