Justice Gorsuch Blasts Use of 'Chevron' Deference in Courts System
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in a Nov. 7 dissenting opinion railed against the court system's use of Chevron deference in a case over veterans' disability benefits. Breaking from his colleagues' decision on the petition for writ of certiori, Gorsuch decried the use of Chevron deference as the "kind of judicial abdication" that "disserves both our veterans and the law."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
In the opinion, the justice detailed the history of Chevron deference and how it "effected a revolution in 1984," since it "overthrew all that came before and enshrined a new rule requiring courts to defer to Executive Branch interpretations of the law." Gorsuch then said that Chevron was not meant to be a revolution and that the author himself said the decision was merely a "restatement of existing law, nothing more or less."
The justice then said that under the broad reading of Chevron, courts fail to fulfill their promises to be neutral magistrates about what the law is and not politically driven actors. "Rather than provide individuals with the best understanding of their rights and duties under law a neutral magistrate can muster, we outsource our interpretive responsibilities," the opinion said. "Rather than say what the law is, we tell those who come before us to go ask a bureaucrat. In the process, we introduce into judicial proceedings a 'systematic bias toward one of the parties.'"
The decision "has profound consequences for how our government operates as well," encouraging executive officials to pen "ever more ambitious rules on the strength of ever thinner statutory terms," the justice said. "... We should acknowledge forthrightly that Chevron did not undo, and could not have undone, the judicial duty to provide an independent judgment of the law’s meaning in the cases that come before the Nation’s courts. Someday soon I hope we might."
In a recent filing in an ongoing case, appellants in a case on application of countervailing and antidumping duties argued against the Court of International Trade's reliance on Chevron deference for CBP in whether the agency will distribute all duties and delinquency interest it collects.