With its 'Chevron' ruling, the Supreme Court claims to be smarter than scientific experts

_{Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash}

Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators.

The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as “Chevron deference.” That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers — as long as those interpretations are “reasonable.” On Monday, the court discarded Chevron deference.

This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such as clean air and water regulations and healthcare standards to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness to dismiss scientific expertise out of hand, in favor of partisan or religious ideologies.

The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent...