One Last Word on the Chevron Deference Alternative title: The Things I Can Only Write About Chevron Here at Substack DAVID BLACKMON
Trump’s people - and I - believe that the recission of Chevron now places the Supreme Court decision that provided the foundation for entire Green New Deal/climate change regulatory agenda in jeopardy
One Last Word on the Chevron Deference
Alternative title: The Things I Can Only Write About Chevron Here at Substack
JUL 1
∙
PAID
I know some readers are probably getting tired of me writing about last Friday’s recission of the Chevron deference by the Supreme Court. But I’m going to write one more time about it right now, and I will also be livestreaming an interview Wednesday with Meghan Lapp, who is the spokesperson for the commercial fishermen who brought the Loper Bright Industries v. Raimondo litigation in the first place. More on that later.
The pieces I’ve posted here to this point on this topic were written for Forbes and the Daily Caller, where I am obligated to conform my writing to the respective editorial standards at those two publications. I have no problem at all with those standards - if I did, I would stop writing at those places. But here at Substack, I am freer to speculate and express opinions based on my many years of experience and inside knowledge of things happening behind the scenes.
So, away we go.
The first thing you need to know is that one of the main criteria used by the Trump administration in vetting nominees to the federal courts was based on whether the candidates had written opinions or papers in which they indicated a willingness to get rid of the Chevron deference if appointed to the bench. Indeed, this willingness was one of the main reasons - if not THE main reason - why Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Cavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch became Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court.
Trump is not joking when he expresses his belief that the entire climate change agenda is a scam designed to promote world socialism/communism. He and his advisors correctly viewed the Chevron deference as the main enabling factor for the massive growth of the administrative state that has enacted most of the Biden/Obama climate change agenda.
Not surprisingly, all three of those justices did their jobs and were a part of the 6-3 majority that overturned this incredibly damaging judicial doctrine in the Loper Bright decision. We should revere them forever for taking this courageous stand.
Trump’s people - and I - believe that the recission of Chevron now places the Supreme Court decision that provided the foundation for the entire Green New Deal/climate change regulatory agenda in real jeopardy.
That foundation was laid in the 2007 decision in the Massachusetts v. EPA case in which a 5-4 Supreme Court gave EPA the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, i.e., plant food, the foundational atmospheric compound for all life on planet Earth, as a “pollutant.”
Regardless of what you think about climate change, that decision was clearly and unambiguously illogical and frankly insane. How can an elemental compound that has been a part of earth’s atmosphere since the atmosphere became a thing billions of years ago, suddenly come to be defined as a “pollutant?” More importantly, that decision was clearly and unambiguously far outside the intent and scope of the Clean Air Act. It could never have been rendered without the existence of the Chevrondeference.
As I noted on Friday, both that decision and the decision in the 1984 case in which the Chevron deference was put into effect were written by the same leftist Justice, John Paul Stevens. That is no coincidence. The recission of Stevens’s 1984 decision now, without question, puts that 2007 decision in real jeopardy. And if that 2007 decision goes down, the entire climate change agenda unravels.
In his majority opinion in the Loper Bright case, Chief Justice John Roberts seeks to placate the climate alarm community by noting that Massachusetts v. EPA and other decisions made under the Chevron rubric will still have the protection of the judicial stare decisis doctrine. But, if stare decisis were absolute, then Roe v. Wade would still be the law of the land, wouldn’t it? This court has also shown little compunction for overturning other longstanding decisions that, like Roe and Massachusetts, were so clearly wrong and which so clearly have zero real basis in the Constitution.
In fact, Justice Gorsuch, in his wonderful concurring opinion in Loper Bright, openly discusses this reality.
So, the reality here is that Massachusetts v. EPA will eventually be reversed, and the recission of Chevron ensures that ultimate outcome. It will take years to come about, given the slowness of the legal process, but it will happen, and the implications of that reality are monumental for our society and impossible to overstate.
That’s the part I couldn’t write in those previous stories. Thank you for your patience.
That is all.