Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, if Congress is effectively to rein in the runaway administrative state, a crucial part of the plan must be to overturn, legislatively, the doctrines of judicial deference to agencies' interpretations of the statutes and regulations they administer. These doctrines, founded in the Supreme Court's decision in Chevron v. NRDC and Auer v. Robbins, have, over the years, turned the courts far too much into a rubberstamp rather than a vigorous check on the self-serving tendencies of agencies to interpret the law to expand their own power. Title II of the bill, the Separation of Powers Act, delivers this legislative reversal of Chevron and Auer. There is one thing, though, that still needs to be added to that portion of the bill; that is language to check the potential that once they are restored--the full interpretive powers that rightfully belong to them--our Article III courts will not engage in judicial activism. To put a point on it, judges must not be allowed to use the Separation of Powers Act as a license to interpret ambiguous statutes always to expand agency power. My amendment, therefore, succinctly but powerfully provides just that. It prohibits courts from reading ambiguities in statutes to contain implicit delegation of legislative rulemaking authority to agencies or from reading those ambiguities expansively to extend agency power. Although it failed in its task, the Chevron doctrine was originally crafted to help check that kind of judicial activism.…”