You probably missed this Supreme Court decision. It will change how government works.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a seemingly innocuous case about fishing vessels that will reshape how our federal government balances power and is one of the most important steps in forcing Congress to become legislators again. 

The new precedent set by the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision overturns one set by Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 ruling that courts must defer to executive agencies’ interpretations of ambiguities in the law, so long as that interpretation is “reasonable.”

In this case, the National Marine Fisheries Service required a group of commercial fishermen to pay the wages of monitoring programs to ensure they were complying with conservation laws. The original statute did not specify that the wages must be paid by the government, so the government handed the fishermen an estimated cost of $710 per day. Friday’s decision sends the fee issue back to the lower courts.

The precedent allowed executive agencies to wildly reinterpret laws in the case of any congressional ambiguity at the whim of whoever was in the White House. 

Supreme Court decision should help reduce executive orders

As Chief Justice Roberts put it in his majority opinion Friday, “The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. Chevron gravely erred in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different just because an administrative interpretation is in play.”

The result of this doctrine was congressional laziness, as lawmakers haphazardly left ambiguities in the law whenever they didn’t feel like answering contentious questions.

Conversely, it has led to an increase in executive power, allowing presidents to reinterpret these ambiguous statutes every time the White House shifts political parties. 

Think of the waves of executive orders on Day 1 of any presidential administration that wildly change the way major issues are handled. These types of action will need to be far more tactful in order to survive scrutiny from federal litigation. 

Chevron was a unique misstep from many of the court’s best minds

Conservative justices didn’t always feel that way. For non-court watchers, Chevron’s deference has been in the crosshairs of conservative justices and legal scholars alike for years. This end point has been a dream of Justice Neil Gorsuch and one that Justice Clarence Thomas has inched toward despite having a vital role in the strengthening of Chevron. 

The late Justice Antonin Scalia, whom many scholars credit with guiding many conservative justices’ originalist philosophies, was once a defender of Chevron.

“The capacity of the Chevron approach to accept changes in agency interpretation ungrudgingly seems to me one of the strongest indications that the Chevron approach is correct,” Scalia wrote in a 1989 Duke Law Journal article. 

Thomas, who wrote in concurrence of Friday’s opinion, once authored another opinion in a case called National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X, which significantly strengthened the deference under which federal courts defer to agency interpretations. Thomas has since urged the court to revisit his own decision, but until now no such concrete action had been taken. 

In many ways, the court has become more disciplined on the separation of powers, even as it has ushered in a new generation (relative term) of conservative justices. Gorsuch, one of the court’s youngest, is often seen as the thought leader of the movement to realign Congress as legislators. 

This should be the legacy of this Supreme Court

While Gorsuch highlighted in his concurring opinion that Chevron was already a zombie precedent at the Supreme Court, which has refused to apply the precedent since 2016, solidifying its place in the dustbin of history impacts the way lower federal courts will read ambiguities in statutes. 

While overturning precedents like Roe v. Wade have had a more visceral impact on the American public, this realignment with the Constitution should be the true legacy of the court’s current makeup. 

Now, the Supreme Court’s main challenge is operating in a time period when Congress is doing little to alleviate its workload. The greatest service that the nine justices on the nation’s highest court can do for future generations is what they’ve done today: forcing the legislative branch to actually legislate.

While the court will undoubtedly be most remembered as the one that killed Roe v. Wade, I will remember it as the one that killed the administrative state. This isn’t the be-all and end-all for congressional dysfunction, but it remains a significant step in the right direction.