That was my thought as well. From SCOTUSblog: “Chevron’s presumption that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations of authority by Congress to federal agencies ‘is misguided,’ Roberts explains, ‘because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.'”

Yeah, but when statutory ambiguities arise because Congress doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground in relation to the issue being regulated, how are the courts going to resolve that ambiguity better than an agency whose personnel are directly involved in the relevant issues?

Abandoning Chevron won’t necessarily give the Supreme Court a lot of new cases, though it will elicit more cases from the right that further hammer what it calls the administrative state.

What this decision will do is pour sand in the gear works. A lot of enforcement work will go undone. What does get done will be tied up in the lower courts for years before the Supremes get their first case – apart from the ones it fast tracks for its own ends.

Kagan: [quote] […] Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulations – over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power. [end quote]

Both Sotomayor (yesterday) and Kagan (today) have written about the conservative majority’s power grabs:

Sotomayor’s dissent in SEC v. Jarkesy:

Today’s decision is a power grab. Once again, “the majority arrogates Congress’s policymaking role to itself.” Garland v. Cargill, 602 U. S. 406, 442 (2024) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting). It prescribes artificial constraints on what modern-day adaptable governance must look like. In telling Congress that it cannot entrust certain public-rights matters to the Executive because it must bring them first into the Judiciary’s province, the majority oversteps its role and encroaches on Congress’s constitutional authority. Its decision offends the Framers’ constitutional design so critical to the preservation of individual liberty: the division of our Government into three coordinate branches to avoid the concentration of power in the same hands. The Federalist No. 51, p. 349 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (J. Madison). Judicial aggrandizement is as pernicious to the separation of powers as any aggrandizing action from either of the political branches.

… As this Court said over a century ago in this public-rights context, that belief “mistakenly assumes that the courts can alone be safely entrusted with power, and that hence it is their duty to unlawfully exercise prerogatives which they have no right to exert, upon the assumption that wrong must be done to prevent wrong being accomplished.”

Kagan’s dissent in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo:

A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.

Jamelle Bouie:

once again i think that mark lemley’s article on the “imperial supreme court” is the most perceptive thing written about the roberts court and its overarching project
harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supreme-court

https://bsky.app/profile/jbouie.bsky.social/post/3kvylfo74al2q

Roberts, like Alito and Thomas, has his facts wrong, but in a way the purposely aggrandizes his and the Court’s role in American governance.

Administrative agencies don’t spend a lot of time sorting out the legal ambiguities of statutes, a role Roberts interprets as stealing his job. They spend most of their time enforcing statutes and filling in gaps that Congress intentionally left for them to fill. Oh, and allowing a complex government to run a complex society.

His judgment will make that much harder to do, which is his point. Given the limits of congressional lawmaking, what he does creates much greater ambiguity. He will allow it to remain unfilled, keeping regulations from restraining resource extraction and profit-taking. Or he will fill it with the evangelical fervor of his peers on the Court.

In short, Congress can’t leave fine-tuning a regulation up to the subject matter experts anymore. Maybe if they wrote that they are doing so explicitly in the regulation, it would work around this finding?

You would think we were living in the 1700s when so little was known that someone could know everything, so a judge really could be a subject matter expert on almost everything. Back to the future, indeed.