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Tucked between headline-grabbing opinions on presidential immunity, Jan. 6 rioters and homeless encampments, the U.S. Supreme Court closed out a momentous session late last month with a series of body blows to the federal bureaucracy.
Under three back-to-back rulings, regulations that touch nearly every aspect of the American economy and American life (see: rules on food safety, water quality, overtime pay, medical billing, carbon emissions, fisheries monitoring and housing discrimination, to name a few) may soon be harder to enforce, more convenient to challenge in court and easier to strike down once challenged. For the conservative legal movement and for major business interests who bristle under what they see as an overreaching federal regulatory apparatus, the rulings mark a once-in-a-generation victory against the “administrative state.”
But in California, the effects of those rulings may be a bit more muted, legal experts say. California has an administrative state of its own.
From worker safeguards to water regulations to LGBTQ-protections on college campuses, the rules enforced by California state agencies often meet and exceed the stringency of their federal counterparts. If judges begin swatting down federal regulations as a result of the recent decisions, California’s own rules could serve as a regulatory backup.
For critics of the court’s recent decisions, that’s some consolation.
“California is, in a way, better situated than some other states because it is big enough and it has enough expertise in state government to actually provide state law protections that can kind of compensate for weakened federal ones,” said Sean Donahue, a lawyer who represents the Environmental Defense Fund. “That may not be true in some smaller states.”
California has plenty of practice playing the role of Blue State bulwark against federal regulatory shifts to the right. During the Trump administration, the state’s Democratic leaders beefed up many state rules in the face of real or anticipated rollbacks out of Washington.
But as the state discovered then, there is a limit to how far California can go its own way. Many federal statutes explicitly prohibit states from overriding them. Such federal preemption has been decreed by the courts in other cases.
“Sometimes yes, California can go on its own,” said Ashutosh Bhagwat, an administrative law professor at UC Davis. “Sometimes it absolutely can’t, and sometimes it’s complicated.”
Three rulings against the bureaucracy
In what may be the most consequential of the session’s three regulatory rulings, the court’s conservative majority swept aside a 40-year-old judicial rule of thumb, known as “Chevron deference.”
The concept, named for the 1984 case that spawned it, required judges to defer to a federal regulator’s interpretation of how to implement a Congressional statute. In a high school civics class version of government, Congress passes the laws and the executive branch, with the President sitting at the top, simply enforces them. But enforcement is rarely simple. Congressional laws can be vague or fail to anticipate every eventuality, technological development or unforeseen problem. Since the New Deal, the federal government’s powers and responsibilities have expanded and grown more complex.
Chevron deference is the notion that if a statute is ambiguous and an agency’s interpretation is reasonable on its face, courts should let the bureaucracy call the shots.
No more.
In his opinion, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that courts may “respect” federal agency expertise, but cannot automatically defer to it. “Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do,” he wrote. The upshot: Regulated industries now have a better shot at successfully challenging the federal rules that govern them.
Building on the theme of putting a leash on federal bureaucrats, the majority also ruled against the Securities and Exchange Commission and put new limits on when agencies can use in-house administrative courts to levy fines, instead requiring agencies to take alleged rulebreakers to court.
In a third opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that the six-year statute of limitations for when an aggrieved business can challenge a federal regulation starts ticking whenever that suing party is first affected by the rule. Financial regulators in that case had argued that the shot clock starts when the rule itself is enacted, giving regulations a degree of finality once that time expires.
Source link : https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/the-supreme-court-took-powers-away-from-federal-regulators-do-california-r/
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Publish date : 2024-07-10 16:00:37
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