Elena Kagan’s scathing Chevron dissent highlights US supreme court’s disregard for precedent

Elena Kagan issued a devastating dissent to the decision of her hard-right supreme court justices to overturn the Chevron doctrine that has been a cornerstone of federal regulation for 40 years,
accusing the majority of turning itself into “the country’s administrative czar”.

Kagan was joined by her two fellow liberal-leaning justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in delivering a withering criticism of the actions of the ultra-right supermajority that was created by Donald Trump.

Such caustic missives have become commonplace from the three outnumbered liberals, with each carefully crafted dissent sounding more incensed and despairing than the last.

In a speech at Harvard last month, she revealed that after some of the supreme court’s recent decisions she has gone back to her office, closed the door and cried.

“There have been those days, and there are likely to be more,” she said.

Kagan’s dissent in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo on Friday was the literary equivalent of crying over 33 pages.
But she was also searingly angry.

She said that in one fell swoop, the rightwing majority had snatched the ability to make complex decisions over regulatory matters away from federal agencies and awarded the power to themselves.

“As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar,” she wrote.

For 40 years, she wrote, the Chevron doctrine, set out by the same supreme court in a 1984 ruling, had supported regulatory efforts by the US government by granting federal experts the ability to make reasonable decisions where congressional law was ambiguous.

She gave a few examples of the work that was facilitated as a result, such as

Now, the hard-right supermajority had flipped that on its head.

Instead of federal experts adjudicating on all manner of intricate scientific and technical questions – such as

– now judges would make those critical calls.

Kagan, displaying no desire to pull her punches, portrayed Friday’s ruling as a
blatant power grab by the chief justice, John Roberts, and his five ultra-right peers, three of whom were appointed by Trump – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

SOURCE the Guardian