• A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has important implications for protecting the principle of separation of powers and should give states greater leeway to fulfill their role in our constitutional system.
• The case involved a federal fishing regulation, but its real importance is in ensuring that federal courts will exercise independent legal judgment in challenges to bureaucratic regulations.
• The decision creates an incentive for Congress to write clearer laws and frees states to challenge misguided regulations that prevent them from taking care of their responsibilities.

​In a U.S. Supreme Court term marked by cases about elections, gun ownership, social media and abortion, it might be surprising that the most consequential decision arose from the context of commercial fishing. The bottom line in the Loper Bright case is that the courts will no longer have to defer to federal government bureaucracies. This is a win for the constitutional separation of powers. Policymakers at the federal and state level should embrace it.

In separation of powers cases, the Supreme Court has the critical role of providing traffic control, keeping the branches of the federal government in their own lanes. The court’s decision does that. By providing a check to agency overreach, the court has also reduced congestion in the lane of the states, who are often the targets of regulation.

Critics of the decision assume that without broad federal regulations, many serious social problems, like environmental degradation, will not be addressed.

That concern is misplaced. Beyond ignoring the constitutional responsibility of Congress to make laws, it ignores the reality that – under the Constitution and in practice – states are responsible for and capable of addressing these important issues. In fact, allowing states greater freedom in doing so allows for localized solutions to local needs and independent experiments to take place around the country, which allows other states, and the federal government, to learn better ways of addressing pressing challenges.

This is one reason the decision is so consequential.

For such a significant result, the case itself is actually quite simple. The court abandoned a rule from a 1984 Supreme Court decision in a case called Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., which said that when Congress creates an ambiguous statute and an executive branch agency creates regulations based on that statute as a result, courts should defer to agency regulations, treating them as a correct interpretation without exercising the independent legal judgment that is usually the responsibility of the federal courts.

The problem this created is that it left unsupervised a proportion of bureaucratic regulations. These regulations are increasingly ubiquitous, affecting the daily operations of schools, public lands, medical care, and much more. Thus, an increasing number of Americans are affected (in the case just decided, owners of small fishing businesses who objected to paying for an official to come on their boats to monitor compliance with federal laws). Under Chevron deference, those who challenged regulations always started off at a disadvantage. The Loper Bright decision can end that imbalance.

This decision can help rein in administrative actions intended to create regulations beyond the laws Congress has passed.

It does this, as the majority opinion notes, by directing courts to perform their constitutional role of exercising “independent legal judgement,” not just assume that agencies know best.

In a separate opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the prior rule “improperly strip[ped] courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the power of executive agencies.” The abandonment of that rule is a step toward getting the branches of the federal government into their proper constitutional “lanes.” It creates an incentive for Congress to write clearer laws and not merely exercise oversight of the federal bureaucracy. It frees states to challenge misguided regulations that prevent them from taking care of their responsibilities.

The effect of the court’s recent decision, though, will not be immediate. In a recent Defending Ideas podcast, Deseret News reporter Kelsey Dallas explained that new and ongoing cases challenging federal regulations will have to apply the court’s new ruling, so it will take some time for the implications of the decision to become clear as those cases make their way through the courts.

By restoring an important safeguard to the principles of separation of power and limited government, those implications could include a return to states and elected lawmakers of authority they have not been able to effectively exercise. That would be a win for everyone.