Supreme Court Leaves Underpinning of Administrative State in Place

The Supreme Court unexpectedly passed up an opportunity to overturn a bureaucracy-empowering legal doctrine when, on June 26, it ruled against a Marine Corps veteran seeking government-provided medical benefits. When the Supreme Court agreed Dec. 10, 2018, to hear the veteran’s appeal of a denial of benefits, it was widely interpreted in the legal community as indicating that the high court, its conservative wing having recently been bolstered by the addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was considering tearing away at the legal underpinnings of the modern administrative state. It was thought that the decision to hear the case might foreshadow a narrowing of the application of the so-called Chevron doctrine that the Supreme Court enunciated in 1984. In the landmark ruling in Chevron v. NRDC, the high court held that while courts “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress,” where courts find that “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.” In other words, Chevron stands for the proposition that an executive agency’s interpretation of a statute it administers is entitled to deference unless Congress has said otherwise...MORE