Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch topples decision his mother helped set
WASHINGTON − When Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch voted Friday to decisively end the deference courts have given federal regulators of environmental, labor and other laws, he helped overturn a 40-year-old doctrine his own mom helped create.
Anne Gorsuch, the justice’s mother, had a rocky ride as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
The Denver corporate lawyer’s nearly two years at the EPA were marked by high-level resignations, a shoot-from-the-hip style and accusations the nation’s top environmental official was a willing patsy for polluters.
“Nobody can be that wrong, all that much, all the time,” Anne Gorsuch told a 1983 Senate hearing as senators from both parties attacked her leadership. “Personally, I have to finally judge that a great deal of it is political harassment…The thing that makes me very upset is that this type of harassment will probably impede our progress in our goal of cleaning up America.”
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She wrote in a 1986 memoir that Reagan “cut his losses” and allowed her to be forced out.
But the first woman to run the EPA scored one seemingly lasting win.
Under Anne Gorsuch, the agency issued a rule that was challenged by environmental groups as insufficiently aggressive against polluters.The case went to the Supreme Court, where a unanimous decision created what’s known as the Chevron precedent – which asked judges to defer to federal agency experts in cases where regulatory law was unclear. Back in the 1980s, those were Anne Gorsuch’s experts, and the ruling was seen as a defeat for environmentalists.
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Anne Gorsuch died in 2004. Decades after she left the federal government, conservatives seeking to escape the rulings of agency experts across the vast scope of federal regulation set their eyes on Chevron – with Anne Gorsuch’s son Neil as an unabashed ally. He called the precedent a “Goliath of modern administrative law,” one that needed slaying.
On Friday, a 6-3 Supreme Court majority overturned Chevron. Federal agencies, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”
Neil Gorsuch was almost gleeful in his concurring opinion.
“Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss,” he wrote. “In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding.”
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