Chevron

Chevron is dead. Many will mourn its passing. Forty is too young, they will say, for a doctrine to have done its work in enabling bureaucrats to decide for us the meaning of laws and the nature of reality. But the US Supreme Court has overturned Chevron in a landmark ruling in Loper Bright and Relentless, cases named after fishing boats which regulators drove toward extinction. It is appropriate, as Justice Gorsuch phrases it in his concurrence, that “the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”   The powers of the bureaucracy reined in by the new ruling may seem subtle or benign. The Chevron doctrine was that when the terms of a law are ambiguous, regulators in administrative agencies have the power to define the meaning of the law and its application.

After consecutive Supreme Court terms with major rulings on abortion, guns and affirmative action, the justices don’t have anything on the docket now that will roil the culture wars. (The Trump ballot case to be argued as this goes to press will be a small blip.) Instead, this year our black-robed philosopher-kings are doing battle with the administrative state — which Steve Bannon promised to “deconstruct” when Donald Trump took office last go-round. That shouldn’t be surprising; notwithstanding the media trope that Trump “stacked the court” to overrule Roe v. Wade, it was instead potential nominees’ commitments to reining in the bureaucracy that was White House counsel Don McGahn’s focus.