Another lever that our elite politicians have used to avoid responsibility has been overturned by the Supreme Court. It was known as Chevron Deference. It was decision handed down from SCOTUS in 1984. It allowed federal agencies to interpret laws themselves if they felt the statute was ambiguous. Under the Chevron decision, federal courts were supposed to defer to the “experts” in such agencies. SCOTUS has ended that practice.
The Chevron decision in 1984 created the most dangerous enemy to individual freedom and liberty our country has ever seen. It comes from the unelected regulators and bureaucrats in the administrative state. This threat comes in the form of regulation, lawfare, fines and weaponized bureaucracies. It is estimated that some 20,000 laws.regulations have emanated from this decision.
When the public complains about the actions of these unelected bureaucrats, our representatives, both members of the House and Senate, sidestep the criticism by indicating that they never voted for such regulations. While this is factually true, unilateral decision making on what a law means by the executive branch violates the separation of powers that our country was founded on.
A little history from Jay Davidson over at American Thinker:
The expansion in Administrative State regulators began under President Woodrow Wilson over 100 years ago. Wilson stated that the population was not smart enough, nor moral enough, to make decisions on its own, and therefore needed a federal employee telling its members what to do. Wilson’s progressive expansion continued and in the 1980s exploded, when the Congress abdicated its sole authority to tax, fine, and regulate to a bureaucracy. That decision was called Chevron Deference. This is the source of the malaise we all feel today from a government out of control.
The legislative branch of our government is supposed to write the laws. The executive branch’s job is to enforce such laws. The judicial branch is to resolve questions related to such enforcement based on the legislative intent at the time the laws were passed.
Overturning Chevron returns the job of resolving issues within the application of a statute to the courts. Chief Justice Roberts notes that Chevron was “misguided.”
Of course, this did not sit well with the three justices who believe that big and bigger government with more and more power invested in the executive branch is the way it is supposed to be. As Justice Kagan noted, the decision takes some of the “woof” out of the executive branch unilaterally deciding what statutes mean.
While this is undoubtedly true, our founders did not invest the executive branch with the power to decide to put “woof” into statutes. Such power is invested with our legislators, the members of the House and Senate. If they want “woof,” they can put it there. Turning lawmaking over to the executive branch is unconstitutional.
Justice Gorsuch had this to say:
“All today’s decision means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.”
This is a major step toward reining in an out-of-control government. No longer can the executive branch depend on sweeping deference to their interpretations of a given statute.
I see a clear thrust against the sweeping changes the administration is trying to accomplish with re-writing what the definition of sex is. I believe this ruling makes those changes to Title IX DOA.