On his podcast Thursday, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro explained the enormous importance of a decision the Supreme Court is about to consider, as it could shift power back to the legislature and take it back from federal agencies.
“The court decision is about whether federal regulatory agencies are capable of regulating huge swaths of American life or whether it turns out those regulations have to stand up to constitutional scrutiny,” he continued.
As they considered two cases in which herring fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island challenged federal rules requiring commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitors, the Court argued over the so-called Chevron deference. As Shapiro explained:
Conservatives have been targeting a framework that was set up in 1984 under a case called Chevron USA v Natural Resources Defense Council. That case set up something called Chevron deference, which suggested that if the Congress passed a law and the law wasn’t specific enough, that regulatory agencies could then use their expertise to read the tea leaves; sit there and Rorschach test the thing and come up with giant books filled with regulations based on the big language of statute. And then presumably the courts would have nothing to say about it, because if Congress really wanted to do anything about it, they could pass a new regulation taking power away from regulatory agencies. But they hadn’t. And therefore the courts could not sit in judgment on anything these regulatory agencies were doing.
“That creates a truly perverse incentive structure where Congress is never held accountable because if something goes wrong, it’s not happening because of them. It’s happening because of the regulators,” he said.
“It is up to the judiciary to maintain the balance of power, the checks and balances that were set up in the Constitution, which is why Chevron deference should die,” he stated bluntly.
“[Justice Neil] Gorsuch has called long ago for getting rid of Chevron deference,” he recalled. “Of course, Democrats are very much in favor of it because they believe in a bureaucratic administrative, centralized government where elections don’t matter so much in the legislative branch, where everything can be done by a powerful executive branch. This is a model of government first pushed by Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century.”
“The notion that regulatory agencies ought to be unanswerable entirely when it comes to their interpretations of statutes by the judiciary hands far too much power to the executive branch of government,” Shapiro asserted. “A restoration, by the way, of checks and balances in government where the legislature legislates and the executive branch executes and the judiciary adjudicates would be the single best thing that could happen in the United States to restore any level of credibility in our government.”
“We think Congress is incompetent because they don’t even do the legislating. They pass giant omnibus packages. And then we think the executive grabs too much power and thus is incompetent because they have too much power over our lives. … And then we think the judiciary just sits there and does nothing about any of this,” he said.
“When the various branches of government do what they were supposed to do in the first place. they reestablish their credibility. That’s why it would be excellent if the Supreme Court did get rid of Chevron deference.” he concluded.