by Thomas M Boyd at New York Post
When Justice John Paul Stephens issued his 1984 opinion in Chevron U.S.A. v. National Resources Defense Council, he started what legal scholar Gary Lawson later called “nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.”
At long last, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear two cases that may signal the beginning of the end to that revolution.
Article I of the Constitution explicitly directs that “All legislative Power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,” not regulatory agencies.
Yet Justice Stephens’ opinion found that “agenc[ies] may . . . properly rely upon the incumbent administration’s views of wise policy” in “reasonably” defining statutory ambiguities.
The legal doctrine that Chevron spawned became known as Chevron deference and former President Ronald Reagan’s White House counsel, Peter Wallison, pointed to it as “the single most important reason the administrative state has continued to grow out of control.”
Forty years of regulatory and judicial tumult has ensued, finally crescendoing to a point that has compelled the Supreme Court to intervene.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, from the District of Columbia Circuit, and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, from the First Circuit, are now before the court…
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