How does this effect the government and their ability to create new policies? And does this ruling carry any potential for irreparable damages?
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Okay this answer is hugely reduced but in honoring the ELI5 format,
Chevron essentially made it so that courts deferred to gov’t agencies when they created regulations.
The overturning of Chevron means that courts no longer *must* defer by default to the gov’t agencies when they create regulations. They still can. In fact many still likely will in order to facilitate moving suits through the system. However, now some courts may determine that a regulation is unconstitutional when they review it.
The short answer is: not much.
SCOTUS had already ruled Chevron deference didn’t apply for “major” issues already.
The simplified take away is that federal agencies can no longer claim a regulation is constitutional and have SCOTUS say “Ok, we trust you know best”. SCOTUS will now have to make that determination for themselves.
It essentially limits the power of the Executive branch.
It does not impact their ability to create new policies. It changes how successfully those policies may be challenged in court.
It has potential for irreparable damage if people successfully challenge a regulation and then do stupid things while the appeals to the challenge works its way through the courts and/or while the legislature passes new laws to close the gap opened by the challenged regulation. The violator might ultimately still be found guilty and have to pay damages but, for things like environmental or safety regulations, you can’t necessarily fix the damages with money.
Under Chevron, a Court had to accept a Regulatory Agency’s interpretation of a statute if it was reasonable. Overturning Chevron means that courts may now apply their own interpretation of statute regardless of what a Regulatory Agency thinks.
In most cases, this will matter very little. Most Judges are unlikely to want to go to the trouble of deeply examining a statute to decide whether or not to accept an official interpretation.
But on some contentious issues, it will likely result in activist judges throwing out regulations and regulatory interpretation *because the judge disagrees with it politically* regardless of the intent of Congress.
That can then lead to activist judges on opposing sides of said issues making dueling rulings that while usually only applicable within their district, might extend over the entire country. Which is bad because then a regulatory agent is caught in the catch-22 of no matter what they choose to do they’ll be violating a court order. This is bad for consistent rule of law.
In a lot of ways it’s pulled the teeth of organizations like the FDA and EPA.
The concern is that these organizations have been setting the rules for so long that Congress got used to passing vague laws with the intention of executive branch organizations setting guidelines on how they were to be enforced for decades.
So what we can expect now is a lot of companies and organizations will push the rules to see what they get away with.
Since a lot of these laws are vague they now have to be challenged in court. A lot of them won’t get challenged at all because the Executive Branch orgs don’t have the resources to do that, so many violations are likely to go unchallenged. While other rulings will get dragged on in procedures and appeals for as long as possible.
All the while a lot of undo-able damage can and will be done to things like the environment.
It’s now up to the States and Congress to pass laws with clear definitions of what’s allowed and what isn’t, so it might vary State to State, and lobbying pressure will push the laws in the direction of what makes sense for companies. If they can’t get a higher CO2 limit in California, why not try in Texas? etc
Furthermore legislatures, particularly Congress are slow and lately are even deadlocked unable to do anything. So it will take decades to pass laws to ‘catch up’ as it were.
So in general this is really awful for consumers and Americans.
In a lot of ways this is a first step towards undoing environmental rules and legislation in favor of companies.
So the court will hear an argument from an agency or company recommendations for a bill and write what they feel is appropriate.
Since a lot of there aren’t that ELI5, I’d say:
If congress passes a law that says “Protect forests”, and the Environmental Protection Agency says “The way you protect forests is to not do major logging in old growth forests”, a court doesn’t have to take it as granted that the basically any way the EPA tries to take that vague law and make it specific is a reasonable interpretation of the vague law.
A lot of laws were written vaguely like that because congress has been bitterly divided for a long time and congress also aren’t experts on things like “How do you protect a forest” so they sort of pass the buck and say “We have experts for that.” So currently most of what gets enforced isn’t the letter of the law but an agency of experts interpretation of the law, so now judges are more easily able to decide that something shouldn’t have been enforced.
The fears are that different courts could disagree leaving no single answer to whether something can be enforced or not, the many current enforcements could all get challenged and clog up the court, agencies may not want to enforce their rules out of fear of them getting challenged.
The fix would be for congress to write WAY longer and more specific laws, but that seems unlikely for the aforementioned reasons:
* They’re already so bitterly divided that even the “Protect forests” bill getting passed is a miracle. A debate in congress over whether 500 or 550 or 1000 old growth logging permits get issued would add years to the process if not make it completely impossible.
* Congress are not experts in the thousands of arenas in which their laws reach. Can you confidently tell me what the safe parts per million of rat shit in food is? The tightness a submerged bolt on a ship must to avoid leaks? The speed at which semi-trucks should travel on different types of roads to walk the line between functional economy and unnecessary danger? I sure can’t, and there probably isn’t even one congressperson who can answer all of those questions, and even Googling it will give you a hundred different answers from a hundred different sources with their own interests and biases.
What happens is basically just that now the regulatory agencies are subject to judicial review. If they overstep the bounds of the laws they are enforcing the courts can slap them.
That’s pretty much it.
Prior to this the regulatory agencies could interpret the laws they were enforcing pretty much however they wanted.
Basically it means if there is an ambiguous portion of the law, the court can consider it themselves and not rely on the agency’s interpretation.
Many have made it out to mean congress cannot empower agencies to decide specific regulatory targets themselves. That is not true. What it covers is things like “the law doesn’t specify how our workers get paid so we can require businesses to pay them themselves (which is literally what the case here involved)”.
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