PolicyLink Statement on Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Chevron Deference Precedent

In response to the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling to overturn the Chevron doctrine, the long-standing 40-year precedent where courts provide deference to federal agency expertise in the interpretation of statutes, Michael McAfee, CEO of PolicyLink issued the following statement:

Friday’s ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority represents a dangerous power grab that takes policy decisions out of the hands of agency experts and into the hands of judges. Each and every day, government agencies implement a vast array of policies that protect Americans—such as ensuring the safety of food, drugs, drinking water, and more. The dismantling of the Chevron doctrine will undercut many of these regulations. With one ruling, the court undid our country’s long-standing approach to governing established by the separation of powers principle. And because of this ruling courts will have more authority to determine the availability of medications and ignore the expertise of the Food and Drug Administration. Judges will have more power to decide the acceptable levels of toxins in our drinking water and in the air we breathe.

A functioning government depends on agency experts to implement health, workplace safety, safe and affordable housing, environmental, and consumer protection laws. A functioning government depends on the authority of Congress to set policy direction through legislation, and the Executive branch to implement policies grounded in scientific and technical expertise. The court’s decision on the Chevron doctrine aggrandizes its own power at the expense of both Congress and the President, inviting more frivolous challenges to core government programs by anti-regulatory interest groups. These challenges will be filed specifically in jurisdictions with partisan judges now empowered to pursue their deregulatory and anti-democratic agenda.

This is the latest challenge to governing for all by the courts and with this ruling the separation of power and the checks and balances promised in the Constitution continues a downward slide on an increasingly slippery slope.

Democracy is intended to be delivered by the whole of government at all levels working in concert under a rule of law.  Separate and apart from the political leadership or lack thereof, and political tribalism notwithstanding, government across all branches and at all levels must be the apparatus for distributing the material, social, environmental, physical, legal, and political benefits of democracy.  This is what it means to govern for all: the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches of government working to deliver democracy, not to dismantle it.