Kansas AG to Newsmax: Ruling Is Win Against Federal Overreach

A Supreme Court ruling that will greatly reduce the power of executive branch agencies is a massive decision against government overreach, Republican Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach told Newsmax on Friday.

In a 6-3 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court overturned its 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave rise to the "Chevron Doctrine." Under that doctrine, if Congress did not directly address a question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold an executive branch agency's interpretation of the statute, as long as it was reasonable.

In a 34-page majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court rejected that doctrine, calling it "fundamentally misguided."

Roberts said the doctrine is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a federal law that federal agencies must follow and instructs courts how to review actions by those agencies. Now courts must decide whether the law means what the agency says instead of deferring to the agency.

"[It is] something truly massive," Kobach told "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." "The Biden administration has made use of executive agencies to do what it cannot do in Congress.

"It doesn't have the votes in Congress to change these major policies, and so it tries to get executive agencies to stretch the meaning of the law. And then these agencies relied on the old Chevron opinion to say, Well, we get to define the terms of the statutes that apply to us, and this is what we say it means."

Roberts wrote the APA "prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action." It codifies for agency cases "the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to [Marbury v. Madison in 1803]: that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment."

"Every court [now] takes a fresh look at the rule, the wording of the statute, and we don't defer to what an agency thinks those words mean," Kobach said. "We get to decide independently what those words mean.

"It's a big, big decision. And it comes at a time right now where the Biden administration is trying to flex its agency muscle again and again."

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