WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch on Friday voted to definitively end the deference the court has given to federal regulators on environmental, labor and other laws, helping to overturn a 40-year-old principle that his own mother helped found.
Justice Gorsuch’s mother, Anne Gorsuch, had a turbulent career 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 senior resignations, off-the-cuff comments and accusations that the nation’s top environmental protection official was at the mercy of polluters.
“Nobody can do that much wrong all the time,” Anne Gorsuch said during a 1983 Senate hearing in which senators from both parties attacked his leadership. “Personally, I have to conclude ultimately that a lot of it is political harassment… What I find so infuriating is that this kind of harassment is going to prevent us from achieving our goal of supposedly cleaning up America.”
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She wrote in her 1986 memoir that President Reagan “cut his losses” and allowed her to be ousted.
But the first woman to run the EPA scored a seemingly lasting victory.
Under Anne Gorsuch, the agency issued rules that environmental groups criticized as not being aggressive enough against polluters. The case went to the Supreme Court, where a unanimous decision created the so-called “Chevron precedent,” which allowed judges to rely on federal agency experts when regulatory law was unclear. In the 1980s, those experts were Anne Gorsuch’s own experts, and the decision was seen as a defeat for environmental groups.
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Anne Gorsuch died in 2004. Decades after she left the federal government, conservatives seeking to ward off agency expert rulings across a broad range of federal regulations turned to Chevron as an outspoken ally, with her son, Neil, calling the case the “Goliath of modern administrative law” that had to be defeated.
On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron decision by a 6-3 majority, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that “federal agencies do not have special authority to resolve statutory ambiguities. Instead, it is the courts that do.”
Neil Gorsuch was almost ecstatic in his concurring opinion.
“Today, the Supreme Court has erected a Chevron tombstone that no one can miss,” he wrote. “In doing so, the Court is returning justices to the rules of interpretation that have guided the federal courts since the nation’s founding.”
