The Supreme Court decided on May 1 to consider rolling back a bureaucracy-empowering legal doctrine when it determined it will hear a case challenging a U.S. Commerce Department rule on fisheries inspectors.
The court’s ultimate ruling could alter the current balance of power between Congress, executive agencies, and the nation’s judiciary by tearing away at the legal underpinnings of the modern administrative state, which critics deride as an illegitimate fourth branch of government.
The decision to accept the case might foreshadow a narrowing of the application of the so-called Chevron deference doctrine that the Supreme Court enunciated in 1984. In the landmark ruling in Chevron v. NRDC, the nation’s highest court held that while courts “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress,” where courts find “Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue” and “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”…