“GT” Thompson (PA-15) joined other Committee Chairs pressing demanding a review of the agency regulations in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
Read the Committee letters, including those sent by Chairman Thompson to the United States Department of Agriculture and United States Forest Service here, and key excerpts below:
“The Supreme Court recently issued a decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which precludes courts from deferring to agency interpretations of the statutes they administer. In its decision, the Court overruled Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), which had allowed courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. By allowing such deference, the Court in Chevron upset the Founders’ careful separation of powers, permitting courts to abdicate the judicial role granted exclusively to them through Article III of the Constitution and enabling the Executive to usurp the legislative authority granted exclusively to Congress through Article I. Unsurprisingly, Chevron unleashed decades of successively broader, more costly, and more invasive assertions of agency power over citizens’ lives, liberty, and property, as agencies adopted expansive interpretations of assertedly ambiguous statutes, demanding courts defer to them.
“Perhaps no administration has gone as far as President Biden’s to found sweeping and intrusive agency dictates on such questionable assertions of agency authority. The Biden Administration has promulgated far more major rules, imposing far more costs and paperwork burdens, than either of its recent predecessor administrations. Many of these rules—such as those promulgated to impose President Biden’s climate, energy, and Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) agendas—have been based on aggressive interpretations of statutes enacted by Congress years and even decades ago, before many issues against which the Biden administration has sought to deploy them were even imagined.
“The expansive administrative state encouraged by Chevron deference has undermined our system of government, overburdening our citizenry and threatening to overwhelm the Founders’ system of checks and balances. Thankfully, the Court in Loper Bright has now corrected its Chevron error, reaffirming that “‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” 603 U.S. at ___ (slip op. at 7-8) (quoting Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803)). This long-needed reversal should stem the vast tide of federal agencies’ overreach. Given the Biden administration’s track record, however, we are compelled to underscore the implications of Loper Bright and remind you of the limitations it has set on your authority.
“As the committees of jurisdiction overseeing your agency, we assure you we will exercise our robust investigative and legislative powers not only to reassert forcefully our Article I responsibilities but also to ensure the Biden administration respects the limits placed on its authority by the Court’s Loper Bright decision.”
