SCOTUS Delivers a Victory for the People

“Today, the court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”

By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox, Brownstone

The past few years, our Independence Day has taken on even more importance. Our way of life, the American way, is under attack. It’s constant. It’s on all levels – social, economic, religious, medical, legal…Anyone who doesn’t think there are people trying to destroy our country from the inside out is not paying attention. This is why the 4th of July is even more pertinent today than it ever has been in our lifetime. It is crucial we ensure that all Americans, young and old, but especially the young, understand the vital importance of preserving our nation for generations to come. There is no place on earth that is more free than the United States of America. If we fall, what nation will stand as a symbol of hope and freedom? 

The key to ensuring our country continues with its wonderful traditions and its liberty and justice for all is to defend our Constitution. Our Constitution is the answer! A couple of years ago I wrote what turned out to be a rather popular article entitled just that…”Our Constitution Is the Answer – Which Is Precisely Why It Is Under Attack!” That article was also published by the wonderful Brownstone Institute (at which I am a Fellow), and also by the Epoch Times.

We need to go back to the basics. We need a well-informed public. We need to go back to teaching our Constitution and civics to our children in school, starting in kindergarten and straight through college. We need to elect leaders who honor and will uphold our Constitution. We need to elect judges who not only know what the Constitution says (sadly, many today do not – especially certain Biden appointees) but judges who will also enforce the Constitution in each ruling they make. After all, that is the oath that every single judge and elected official in our country swears to before they take office!

This leads me to the topic at hand…a tremendous win for the Constitution was just had in the United States Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”), and it is amazing news for We The People.

SCOTUS Kills Chevron! I’m thrilled!

It was about time. Chevron was the single largest “legal loophole” affront on our Constitution in half a century! And now, it’s dead. Amen!

For anyone unaware of what Chevron is, I’ll give a bit of background.

By a vote of 6-3 with the Court’s most radical left-wing jurists, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, SCOTUS overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which birthed the doctrine known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that doctrine, courts were required to uphold an agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of a statute whenever the government argued in court that the law or statutory provision at the heart of the lawsuit was ambiguous.

In other words, the Chevron doctrine said that, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a legal dispute, then a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute. So, complete deference had to be given by courts to unelected bureaucrats who were beholden to no one (and certainly not beholden to We The People). Why the deference? Because the attitude was that government knows best.

But in a 35-page ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts on June 28th, in Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al., the Supreme Court rejected that doctrine, calling it “unworkable” and “fundamentally misguided.” Roberts explained that the framework allowed agencies to “change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.”  Remember from some of my writings about my quarantine camp lawsuit against the New York State governor and her Department of Health, agencies are not supposed to act unless authorized to do so by the legislature (ie Congress at the federal level, and state legislatures at the state level). What Justice Roberts and the majority are saying in this decision is that the agencies must be reined in. They can no longer make the rules and change laws in the process.

Was SCOTUS right to overturn Chevron? 

ABSOLUTELY 100%! You see, the Chevron doctrine is a clear violation of Separation of Powers, which is the very cornerstone of our free nation. Separation of Powers is clearly delineated in our Constitution, and it holds that we have three, co-equal branches of government (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial), each with its own authority and power to act. The three branches work together to check and balance one another such that no one branch becomes too powerful than the others by being allowed to usurp the power of another branch.

What Chevron did was to tip the balance of power towards the Executive Branch (ie the President and the agencies that sit beneath him, and serve at his will). Chevron took a power from the Judicial Branch (ie the courts) and gave it to agencies in the Executive Branch such that instead of courts deciding and interpreting what the language in a law meant, the power was given to the agencies to say what the language meant and then the courts had to follow the agencies’ interpretations. This is so wrong! The Constitution is clear – the lawmakers dictate what the agencies can do. Not the other way around.

Justice Clarence Thomas penned a concurring opinion to the majority opinion in which he echoed my interpretation – that the Chevron doctrine violates constitutional Separation of Powers because it requires judges to give up their constitutionally endowed power to exercise their independent judgment in a situation, and instead allows the Executive Branch to “exercise powers not given to it.”

Furthermore, the Chevron doctrine deference to agencies was a direct violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, a federal law that sets forth the procedures that agencies must follow when carrying out their work. This was the main reason the majority struck down the doctrine. However, even more consequentially, Chevron promoted, if not created, the toxic Administrative State that we are constantly battling against as it slowly but surely results in the government creeping ever more increasingly into our daily lives. I remind you, there is no fourth branch of government.

And yet, Chevron basically said there was. Chevron gave a power to agencies that they should have never had, and don’t think they didn’t use it to garner more power for themselves at every chance they could, because they certainly did. In the 40 years since Chevron was decided, the federal government used it, and federal courts cited it almost 20,000 times!

Chevron deference, in combination with one-party rule which many states (including New York) have, has led to the unprecedented attack on our Constitution and the rapid decline in our rights as citizens. Chevron feeds the perilous “catch me if you can” attitude that the left promotes and constantly pursues. I have written about this obstinate attitude before, and I constantly discuss it in my speeches and lectures. It’s the notion that government actors do whatever they want, and then they say, “Catch me if you can!”…they know that IF you take the time, energy, and money to bring a lawsuit against them, then it will take a long time (years) and a ton of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars) to get a court to rule against them and force them to stop whatever illegal action they have implemented.

My quarantine lawsuit against Governor Hochul that I won on behalf of Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, Congressman Mike Lawler, and Uniting NYS is the perfect example. This is why we need to remove from office those politicians and elected judges who deny or ignore our Constitution, and vote in people who not just understand our Constitution, but defend and promote it. The future of our great nation depends upon it, and this fatal blow to Chevron is a tremendous boost to our cause.

As Justice Gorsuch said in his concurring decision, “Today, the court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.” To that I say, “Amen.”

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