Increasingly, however, SCOTUS and lower courts have been taking a different view - as Trump-appointed judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle did when she overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s travel mask mandate last month.
Unless the answer is clearly no, courts should assume that the agency knows its business better than what conservatives used to call “unelected activist judges.” Since then, this principle has become known as the Chevron standard, or “ Chevron deference.” Under the reasoning laid out in the Chevron decision, courts should generally defer to federal agencies - in that instance, Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency - when determining if a regulation is warranted under that agency’s statutory authority. The Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter had interpreted that expansively when Ronald Reagan’s administration later redefined the term more narrowly, environmental advocates asked the courts to not let them. That case also involved the Clean Air Act, with the ambiguous phrase at issue being “stationary sources” of air pollution. National Resources Defense Council decision. Who gets to do that? For decades, courts have generally allowed federal agencies to make those calls - a policy made explicit in the 1984 Chevron v. Laws need to be reapplied to new circumstances over time. If the Court significantly rolls this federal authority back - and there are signals it will - the implications could start to shift the entire locus of American power, and the country will be dealing with the fallout for years.Ī great deal of Washington’s power rests on a fact you don’t learn in civics textbooks: When Congress passes new laws, those laws are filled with instructions that can be vague, or debatable, or even self-contradictory. Whenever the Supreme Court undercuts an issue at the national level, as it did by weakening voting rights law in 2013, the warfare shifts to the states. They all have a bearing on one of the basic responsibilities of the government in Washington: How much latitude federal agencies have to interpret, and then enforce, the laws that Congress passes. The West Virginia case asks whether paragraph 7411(d) of the Clean Air Act applies only to actions that power plants control at their facilities, or beyond those physical boundaries.īut there’s a reason these cases are being left to the end of the term - typically when the Court drops its most newsworthy decisions. One of the Medicare cases involves parsing a paragraph of Medicare law that Justice Stephen Breyer, in oral argument last November, admitted he had to read “two or three times” to understand. On the surface, they address typical Supreme Court arcana.
The third case is about the Clean Air Act: West Virginia v. Empire Health Foundation and American Hospital Association v.
The first two cases involve Medicare payments: Becerra v. They all sound dry, but their implications could be sweeping.
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