We are being demonetized by many platforms and are dealing with Sanctions from what I believe to be a corrupt judge. Please support us at https://www.givesendgo.com/renzlaw and https://tomrenz.com/shop/.
Did the Supreme Court of the United States just save America? In all honesty they may have given us our best shot. As we continue to fight to see a Trump presidency it is important to note that the unelected 4th branch of government is working hard to ensure that Trump will have his hands tied when he gets in to office. We are seeing endless terrible regulations pushed through and some of the nonsense we are passing in Congress is funding further expansion of the power of the bureaucrats. This is untenable but hope has come in the way of the SCOTUS decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
The Loper case is related to an unremarkable but terrible regulation related to fishing vessels. It has been weaving it’s way through the courts for some time but the underlying questions was critical: is the Chevron doctrine constitutional? The Chevron doctrine was a legal fiction created entirely by the SCOTUS in it’s ruling in 1984 on Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984). The Chevron case was related to a question of statutory interpretation and the Court decided that when a statute is ambiguous a court should defer to an agency’s interpretation of that law. This was a clear abdication of the duties of the court as laid out in the Constitution and APA (Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706) in my opinion and has lead to administrative agencies being able to do anything they want without any opportunity for people to challenge the legality of their actions.
I do not believe it is an overstatement to say that Chevron was the single greatest threat to our republic we have seen in a century plus. The Chevron doctrine tied my and hundreds of other lawyers hands in challenging the actions taken during COVID, many of the lies related to global warming, certain aspects of the 2020 election steal, and more aspects of federal overreach than any other legal precedent I could point to. It was disastrous, and remained a nightmare for anyone that believes in the Constitution up until Loper.
Going back to the New Deal times, courts have long given great deference to agency interpretations of facts. The theory is that civil servants are honest and experts in their fields. While it became manifestly clear during COVID that many of our civil servants embody corruption, “official data” at least makes some sense as the people hired to do these jobs are theoretically qualified (I disagree with that position). The problem Chevron created was that the level of deference was expanded so far that you could not challenge anything an agency did without seeing a Chevron defense in the response and there was no way of knowing if a court would even consider your action or ignore it under the nonsensical Chevron doctrine.
As if all this was not enough, Chevron has manifested numerous related interpretations and legal tests making it nearly impossible to bring an effective action before the courts. While many lawyers will fuss with the broad I’m making, I do not think it is an overstatement to say that the practical reality of Chevron was that any challenge to an agency or agency action was going to be decided based on an individual judges feelings towards the action rather than objective law. A smart judge would recognize that Chevron gave them the wiggle room to ensure a case came out how they wanted it to because the law contradicted the APA and so he or she could either throw a case out on Chevron or deal with it under the APA. This is not how the courts were intended to work under the Constitution and the majority finally fixed this issue. Justice Roberts stated in his opinion:
… Given the Court’s constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron, it is hard to see how anyone could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chev- ron in any particular case or expect it to produce readily foreseeable outcomes. And rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so…
The fall of Chevron does not mean we are clear. Precedents set under Chevron stand unless and until they are challenged again. We still have agencies that will promulgate endless unconstitutional rules until the common law under Loper is fleshed out further but at least the courts have opened their doors again. We the people can now begin challenging the unconstitutional behavior of these crooked bureaucracies and I, for one, am eager to get to work. This is a tremendous opportunity and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do with reapplying the Constitution to the 4th branch of government.
We are being demonetized by many platforms and are dealing with Sanctions from what I believe to be a corrupt judge. Please support us at https://www.givesendgo.com/renzlaw and https://tomrenz.com/shop/.
Good News, Thx!
This is an excellent start! Thank you for all you do to defend our Constitution and the rule of law!