Washburn: SCOTUS Gets It Right

Michael Cohen’s recent Concord Monitor My Turn “Supreme Court ruling limits power of federal agencies” is a chicken little response suggesting the sky is falling by overturning the Chevron doctrine which was long overdue.

The case involved New England fishermen who were required to pay for federal monitors who were monitoring the number of fish they caught. The court ruled that the federal agency had no legal basis for issuing such a ruling and that was a good thing. Too long have federal agencies issued rules base on administration favored experts and sometime real science and many times based on faux scientific theories. This ruling drove a wooden stake through the heart of the “deep state” that has been running amuck under Chevron. Mr. Cohen’s laundry list of possible challenges is alarming not from a standpoint of what is wrong in the current rule making process.

This ruling shifts the policy making process out of the hands of unelected bureaucrats who are immune from elected official oversight. So, let the law suits begin and if there is a legislative basis to create the rule, the rule will be sustained. However; if the rules lack legislative authority the court system will justifiably overrule them.

The current administration could conduct an internal review to cure the problem, but since most of the more significant rules currently issued do not have any legal basis, this will not happen. The Biden-Harris administration wants to give Obama Care subsidies to illegal aliens contrary to the prohibitions contained in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 that generally prohibits providing public benefits to illegal aliens.

The first court case after the SCOTUS ruling overturned the Net Metering administrative rules as the rules had no legal basis in the 1930’s Communications Act.

SCOTUS in its ruling delivered a serious message to Congress; you must include specific authorization in legislation for agencies to create administrative rules.