A number of recent Supreme Court decisions may jeopardize a large swath of the Biden administration’s progressive policy actions on the environment, labor relations, and what the administration calls “corporate greed.”
The most consequential of these decisions was the June SCOTUS opinion overturning what is known as “Chevron deference.” The original case, Chevron vs. the Natural Resources Defense Council, was decided in 1984. The 1984 opinion established a precedent that has guided how the federal government has worked for forty years. That case established that if Congress had not articulated a specific argument about a specific issue that was governed by a federal law, then the federal agency that administered that law had the right to interpret how the law was applied.
This has resulted in a huge expansion of rules and regulations from federal agencies that are not overseen by Congress. The 2024 SCOTUS ruling that overturned Chevron has changed that, and government agencies are nervous about how far they can go in enforcing laws in the new legal environment.
This also affects the White House and its executive decision-making powers. Americans have become used to hearing about “executive orders” from the White House, but these did not used to be so “everyday normal.” Executive orders are simply commands from the president that interpret laws, and regardless of who occupies the White House, many observers believe they have been used by presidents to unilaterally make binding law without the consent of Congress.
Under the Biden administration, for example, we have seen an executive order reinterpreting the federal law called Title IX. That law, in place since 1972, barred schools that take federal tax money from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex. It has traditionally been interpreted to require schools to provide equal educational and athletic opportunities for girls and women.
But the Biden administration, in its zeal to promote what it calls transgender rights, used an executive order to reinterpret the law to mean that men who call themselves women, and vice versa, had to be treated as the gender they claim to be. In plain terms, a school would now be considered in violation of Title IX if it did not let a 16-year-old boy play on a high school’s girl’s swimming team, for example.
In addition, President Joe Biden has issued a number of orders barring what he says as illegitimate credit card fees, expanding which employees are entitled to overtime pay, and “forgiving” student loans by placing the repayment burden on the taxpayer.
Orders of this type face an uncertain future, and there is no guarantee that they will survive even if Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as president.
