Supreme Court upholds precedents on deference to agencies

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a conservative push to limit the power of federal agencies.

The high court declined to overrule two past cases that had been criticized by conservatives as giving unelected officials vast lawmaking power. But the way the justices clarified the older rulings led one justice to suggest that while the cases hadn’t been overruled they’d been left “on life support.”

Chief Justice John Roberts broke with his more conservative colleagues and joined the court’s four liberal justices in refusing to overrule the earlier cases. The court’s other conservatives were ready to, in the words of Justice Neil Gorsuch, “say goodbye” to the decisions.

The issue of overturning precedents is front and center during this term of the court as observers are watching to see how far and how fast a newly more conservative court is willing to go in its decisions. The court’s ruling was something of a surprise because when the court takes a case with the specific purpose of reconsidering whether to overrule a past decision it is generally a signal it is ready to do so.

The case the court was considering has to do with how courts should respond when an agency — such as the Transportation Security Administration or Mine Safety and Health Administration — writes a regulation that is ambiguous. Previous cases said judges should defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation if the interpretation is reasonable.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the approach makes sense: “Want to know what a rule means? Ask its author.”

Kagan, writing for a majority of the court, reiterated that an agency has “significant leeway to say what its own rules mean.” But she also explained the limits of when deference applies, noting among other things that the agency’s reading must still be reasonable and deference shouldn’t apply unless the regulation is genuinely ambiguous.

The specific case before the justices involved Vietnam veteran James Kisor. Kisor has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and has tangled with the Department of Veterans Affairs over disability benefits.