The most important Supreme Court case you’ve never heard of

OPINION:

All eyes are on the Supreme Court as the Justices issue some of their most significant—and controversial—rulings of the term. But the case with the biggest impact on our daily lives won’t be the one with the most headlines or the most tweets about it.

Perhaps the most important case will be Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which the Supreme Court released this week. This case overturned the Chevron v. NRDC case. This landmark case is an earthquake for all three branches of the federal government and for the private sector alike. Here is why.

Our Founding Fathers created a system of checks and balances, dividing power between the three branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states because, as James Madison put it in Federalist 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Forty years ago, that system went out of balance. The Supreme Court ruled in Chevron v. NRDC that the Court, and courts following its precedent, would defer to administrative agencies on how to interpret the laws they were supposed to carry out as long as they are “reasonable.”

This might sound like some abstract legal question or academic dispute, but it has had vast consequences for American families—consequences that were as harmful as they were predictable.

So-called ‘Chevron deference’ essentially gave agencies a blank check and, as a result, weakened both the courts and Congress. Since Chevron, the size and impact of the federal bureaucracy have exploded. As of 2022, government regulations cost the economy $3 trillion annually, translating to $12,800 per employee each year for employers. Over 6,500 federal regulations were finalized between 2005 and 2022, continuously adding to this cumulative regulatory weight.

Not all regulations are bad. Regulation is a critical function of government and necessary to the proper functioning of the private sector. But regulations must be made according to the laws written by our elected representatives. Otherwise, the voters don’t get a voice. When regulators know they have a blank check from the courts, the result is often regulatory malpractice.

The best-known example in recent years involved gas stoves. In January of 2023, a commissioner on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, an agency that most Americans have never heard of, floated the possibility of a regulation banning gas stoves in an interview with CNN.[1]

Whether you agree with a gas stove ban or not, this would be an important decision affecting our economy and our personal liberty. Gas stoves are used in one-third of American homes.

When the commissioner’s comments were published, people were outraged to hear that they might lose their choice in appliances—and especially outraged because no one had ever taken a vote on it. They had no idea where the commissioner got the power to do something like that. For a decision this important, people should get a vote and a voice.

Depriving the people of their voice has severely damaged our politics over the last 40 years. With unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats making important rules affecting our daily lives, the American people have grown increasingly frustrated with Washington—and rightly so. We can vote for our representatives in Congress, but we often can’t hire or fire the people who actually govern us. Meanwhile, the job of being a Member of Congress, for some, has seemed to devolve from writing laws into performance art—making speeches and writing angry letters about agency actions while being powerless to stop them.

With the Loper decision, we have a historic opportunity to restore our system of checks and balances and bring the people’s voice back to Washington. The courts will no longer be able to punt to the agencies. Congress will have to write clear laws that agencies can understand and follow. The Executive Branch will have to stick to the law as written. Private companies and citizens have a major opportunity to win relief from unlawful regulations. The end of the Chevron era and the return of Constitutional checks and balances to the regulation process will require a complete rethinking of how the branches operate.

The Loper decision is a victory for our Constitution and for the American people. But it is also a call to action to judges, legislators, regulators, and business leaders. The decision marks merely the beginning of a national conversation about restoring balance to our government and accountability of policymaking to the democratic process.

• Ken Nahigian is a Co-Founder of The Balancing Act Project, an organization dedicated to restoring balance and accountability to our federal and state governments