WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has been out of office for more than three years, but he just scored a major victory at the Supreme Court.
friday‘s ruling It was a belated victory for Trump’s regulatory agenda, with all three of his high court appointees joining the 6-3 conservative majority that overturned the landmark 1984 ruling Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
“The decision was the culmination of a decades-long campaign funded by billionaires to usurp and weaponize the unelected power of the Supreme Court to generate huge profits for corporate interests at the expense of everyday Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former congressional Democrat staffer. he is executive director of the judicial review group Judicial Accountability.
Under the Trump administration, the Republican-led Senate, tasked with confirming the president’s judicial nominees, “has become a conveyor belt for ideological, corporate judges,” he said.
Business groups welcomed the ruling, which the National Federation of Independent Business said Friday would “level the playing field in litigation between small businesses and administrative agencies.”
Overturning Chevron, a decision long frowned upon by business interests, has long been a goal of conservative lawyers who see it as giving too much power to bureaucrats.
The original ruling said courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting ambiguous laws, but in Friday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts said that approach was “fundamentally flawed.”
“Perhaps most importantly, Chevron’s presumption is false because agencies lack specific authority to resolve statutory ambiguities. Courts do that,” he added.
Don McGahn, Trump’s White House adviser, memorable He said in 2018 “It’s really the other side of the same coin” at the conservative political conference, the president’s attempt to roll back judicial preferences and rules.
He cited then-newly appointed Judge Neil Gorsuch as an example of what the administration was looking for in nominees. One of the reasons why Gorsuch appealed to McGahn and others who had the floor His nomination in 2017 was that he wrote a scathing opinion suggesting that Chevron be overturned.
Gorsuch duly signed Robert’s majority opinion on Friday, as did Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
McGahn, who is now back in private practice at the Jones Day law firm, did not respond to a request for comment on Friday’s ruling. The Trump campaign did not respond.
In another regulatory matter, the Supreme Court may act in the coming days on a petition by McGahn and his Jones Day colleagues seeking to use the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set workplace safety rules.
Sean Donahue, a lawyer who often represents environmental groups, said Chevron’s overturning was similar to Roe v. Wade v. became “sort of a litmus test” for the right to elect judges who oppose abortion rights. before.
One of the critics of the recent dissenting decision by liberal Justice Elena Kagan is that the court is usurping power from federal agencies.
“The rule of judicial modesty gives way to the rule of judicial modesty. In recent years, this court has often assumed that decision-making authority Congress delegated to agencies,” Kagan wrote.
Democratic members of Congress also chimed in, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., describing the decision as “prioritizing corporate greed over the health, safety and welfare of the American people.”
The decision came a day after the trial another 6-3 decision had weakened the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission along ideological lines, drawing equally strong resentment from the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The fear among those on the left is that the Chevron decision will prevent agencies from addressing major issues like climate change because judges will constantly put their own expertise on the backburner.
It remains to be seen whether the ruling will have such a broad impact, with some commentators saying that, in most cases, judges will still pay close attention to what the agency’s experts say.
Thomas Berry, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the decision properly ended a doctrine that gave agencies too much power to judge the extent of their authority.
“Opponents argue that repealing Chevron would not give judges new authority to decide policy issues,” he added.