Loper Bright significantly expands the power of the Supreme Court at the expense of democratic institutions of government.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overruled the 40-year-old Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, will not affect Americans’ lives in as stark and immediate a way as the 2022 decision overruling Roe v. Wade.
But like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Loper Bright has the potential to fundamentally transform major aspects of the health, safety, and well-being of most Americans. That potential is especially true when it is viewed alongside some of the other major cases about agency power the Court has handed down in recent terms—and indeed in recent weeks—that have stripped agencies of power and shifted that power directly to federal courts.
In this term alone, the Court eliminated a key mechanism used by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enforce securities laws and enjoined an important Environmental Protection Agency emissions standard based on, in the words of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in dissent, an “underdeveloped theory that is unlikely to succeed on the merits.”
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