In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court decisions have undercut federal agencies’ ability to curb pollution and fight climate change.

Several cases decided in 2024 continued this trend,
systematically shifting the power to make and enforce environmental regulations over to the judicial branch.

Though it will likely take years to know the full consequences of this year’s rulings,
legal experts say they have profound implications as to how federal agencies can respond to the threat of climate change.
Congress passed the majority of the laws that protect our lands and waters decades ago,
and with an increasingly polarized political environment, legislators have passed few new environmental regulations since.
In the past few decades, Congress has in effect tasked federal agencies with adapting existing laws to our new climate reality,
said Chris Winter, executive director of the University of Colorado Law School’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment.

But with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court in place, these laws have come under increased scrutiny,
including in several of the court’s 2024 landmark decisions.
Perhaps the most significant was #Loper #Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,
which overturned the 1984 #Chevron #doctrine, a powerful legal tool that gave federal agencies the ability to interpret and enforce ambiguous or unclear laws.
For decades, the courts have largely deferred to agency experts in crafting and enforcing regulations,
since those agencies typically have greater expertise in their subject areas than judges do.
By eliminating Chevron, the court transferred the authority to clarify the meaning of a written law to the judicial system.

Loper Bright has already raised “a lot of uncertainty” about whether or how agencies should create and enforce environmental regulations,
according to Winter.

The last few years have signaled a structural change in the balance of power between courts and federal agencies, he said,
with courts now working hard to rein in federal regulators.

Meanwhile, industry groups eager to roll back regulations have filed lawsuits in conservative states with business-friendly judges.

In federal courts in Wyoming, Utah and Montana, for example,
groups representing farmers, ranchers and the fossil fuel industry have cited Loper Bright as a precedent for suing the Biden administration to overturn the 2024 #Public #Lands #Rule,
which designated conservation as a legitimate “use” for public lands in line with extractive uses like mining, grazing and logging.

As of Sept. 6, Loper Bright has been cited in 110 federal cases, according to the advocacy group Democracy Forward.

“These days, it doesn’t feel like you can really think deeply about the law. It is simply a political battle,”
said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center,
a nonprofit public-interest environmental law firm.

Altogether, the body of law emerging from the court has “prioritized politically oriented property rights and economic rights,”
Schlenker-Goodrich said.
“In other words, corporate rights and corporate power.”

https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-supreme-court-decisions-that-gutted-environmental-protections-in-2024/

On Friday, the Court’s right-wing majority decided in
"Loper Bright v. Raimondo"
to overturn something called the #Chevron #doctrine or Chevron deference,
which granted federal agencies the authority to interpret the laws that Congress passes.

“In one fell swoop,” Justice Elena Kagan summarized in her dissent, “the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue
—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden
—involving the meaning of regulatory law.”

Here’s how the Chevron doctrine is supposed to work.

“Sometimes Congress will use language that says, ‘Put together a system that requires companies to install systems of pollution control,’”
Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told me by phone.

“What does ‘system’ mean?
What Chevron said was, when that comes up, the agency gets to take a shot at explaining what ‘system’ means.
When a judge isn’t sure of what something means, the judge defers to the agency’s definition.
By removing Chevron, what Justice Roberts is saying is,
‘When you see that word “system,” judge, you’ve got to figure out what that means.’”

When members of Congress write laws, they employ their own staffers
as well as those of committees and independent bodies like the Congressional Research Service,
which is tasked with providing “timely, objective, and authoritative research and analysis” on a nonpartisan basis.

Even with those resources, laws
—and complex regulatory statutes, especially
—are written to contain significant ambiguities,
allowing for future developments and for agencies to put their considerable resources to work in determining how best to implement federal policy priorities.

It has historically been up to the EPA, for example, to determine that when the Clean Air Act refers to stationary and moving sources of pollution,
that specifically means smokestacks, cars, and a number of other devices.

Judges have no relevant expertise to make such determinations but are now entrusted with that power should they hear a case concerning those definitions.

“Judges are by design isolated from society. Their staffers are, at best, recent law school graduates,” Sankar said.
“They have no ability to do research. They’re stuck with what the parties to a case tell them.
Agencies employ hundred and thousands of scientific experts who do years of research and stakeholder outreach to learn about the impact of their regulatory decisions.”

Agency heads are also subject to the control of the democratically elected politicians who appoint them,
who can be at least theoretically held accountable for their decisions and those of their appointees come Election Day.
Judges
—on the Supreme Court, most infamously
—are comparatively insulated from democratic accountability.

What’s worse is that
right-wing operatives like Leonard Leo
have spent years stacking the judicial branchwith activist, ideological appointees
churned out of outfits like the Federalist Society,
fueled by donations from corporate polluters and other industries with a vested interest in seeing certain regulations kneecapped.

The silver lining in the court’s ruling on Friday is that the justices opted not to call into question every single decision made on the basis of the Chevron doctrine.

Sankar emphasizes that the ruling isn’t automatically deregulatory. “Agencies are still supposed to be trying to figure out the best reading of statutes.
Now Congress is taking risks whenever it writes a law.
If the statute isn’t clear they can’t be sure what a court is going to think of it,
especially with some of these aggressively deregulatory judges.
If you’re an agency now you know that you are not going to get the benefit of the doubt anymore.”

Chevron’s destruction may well also be seen as an invitation to well-resourced industries and political actors to bring cases
that can chip away at whatever rules they don’t like,
particularly if they’re heard by judges who share their friends and/or politics.

The worst, in other words, is yet to come.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183285/supreme-court-chevron-gorsuch-nitrous-oxide

US supreme court strikes down 40-year precedent, reducing power of federal agencies

The US supreme court has overturned one of its own most important precedents, the #Chevron #doctrine, that for the past 40 years has guided the work of federal government in critical areas of public life, from food and drug safety to environmental protection.

In a ruling that the Biden administration has warned could have a “convulsive” impact on the functioning of government,
the court’s hardline conservative majority delivered a major blow to the regulatory powers of federal agencies.
Voting as a block, the six rightwing justices who wield the supermajority threw out the supreme court’s own 1984 opinion in Chevron USA Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, which has required the courts to defer to the knowledge of government experts in their reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws.

Writing the opinion, chief justice John Roberts bluntly stated that the Chevron precedent “is overruled”.
He lambasted the legal theory laid out in the ruling, claiming it “gravely erred” and calling it was “misguided” and “unworkable” despite the fact that it has steered the functions of the federal government for four decades.

Roberts not only eradicated the Chevron doctrine, he turned it on its head.
Under his ruling, the relationship between courts and federal agencies is reversed:
in the modern era, the courts have shown deference to the expertise of agencies, but from now on the courts alone will decide.

“The constitution assigns to the federal judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate cases and controversies,” Roberts wrote.
“Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

In recent years, the Chevron doctrine has become a central target of rightwing groups that blame it for what they see as a proliferation of government regulations executed by unelected bureaucrats in the so-called “deep state”.
A key group behind the supreme court challenge, the New Civil Liberties Alliance,
was founded with seed money from the oil billionaire Charles #Koch.
In a raft of amicus briefs to the court, alliances of scientists, environmentalists and labor organizations warned that undoing Chevron would roll back a regulatory framework that for four decades has improved the health, safety and welfare of Americans.
It would also unravel efforts to protect the environment and fight the climate crisis.

Elena #Kagan issued a withering dissent, which was joined by her fellow liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
She accused her rightwing peers on the bench of throwing out a precedent that had stood for 40 years as “a cornerstone of administrative law”.
Chevron had been applied over that period in thousands of judicial decisions and become “part of the warp and woof of modern government”, said Kagan.
By casting out decades of settled law, the conservative supermajority had once again asserted their authority.m

“The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Kagan added.
The ruling was widely denounced by liberal observers. Elizabeth #Warren, the US senator from Massachusetts, said it was a “power grab by the far right to benefit the wealthy and well-connected”.
Laurence #Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard law school, said on social media:
“The administrative state just died. The imperial judiciary” has “relegated Congress to a secondary role”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/28/us-supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other