The number two House Democrat, moderately progressive Katherine Clark (MA), issued a sweet statement today saying “Keith is a beloved member of the Capitol Hill community and the House Democratic Caucus family. He has dedicated over two decades of his career to public service, helping advance our democracy and build a stronger, more just America. I am incredibly grateful to have worked alongside him, and I wish Keith all the best in his next chapter.” Keith is Keith Stern, who has worked on Capitol Hill since 1997, first for Lucille Roybal-Allard, then Jim McGovern, then Nancy Pelosi and, now, Clark. And the “next chapter?” He’s taken a new job in a related field. He'll be part of anarmy viewed by most Americans as the most dishonest and least ethical in the U.S.— a lobbyist. Last year, Gallup’s annual poll on professions showed once again that Americans rate lobbyists as the worst among us, with lower honesty and integrity ratings than used car salesmen, advertising executives, business executives, even lower— than just barely— than Member of Congress.
“Stern,” reported John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman this morning, “is heading to Cornerstone Government Affairs, where he will join several former top Hill leadership aides. Chris Hodgson, former Vice President Mike Pence’s legislative director and a former top aide to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and David Planning, the former floor director to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, are both at Cornerstone.” The firm’s clients include Google, Pfizer, Samsung, Valero Energy, Florida Sugar Cane League, Nascar, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, HSBC Holdings, Boeing, Target, AbbeVie, Roche, Microsoft, General Dynamics, Nike, American Gaming Association, Exxon Mobil and Citigroup.
Most people thinking about the Supreme Court today, are thinking about the immunity decision they handed down this morning— the one that seems to have retroactively declared Nixon exonerated of all his crimes and that will effectively do the same for Trump (not counting the ones related to business fraud, rape and stuff like that— just all the coup-related stuff). But there’s more to the depths of evil emanating from the Court than just this nightmare they just handed to Tanya Chutkan: the big wet kiss they’ve planted on the mouths of lobbyists and their well-heeled clients (and the shareholders of those clients— like those who bribe the Justices). “Powerful opponents of federal regulation— in climate, finance, health, labor and technology— are already planning how to use the ruling for their advantage,” wrote Tony Romm yesterday.
This was very bad for unions and working families and very, very, very good for the wealthy special interests that employ corporate lobbyists. Alan Grayson, not just a former Congressman and current candidate for the Florida state Senate, but also an accomplished attorney, told us in way of explanation today that “The basic idea of ‘Chevron deference’ is that agencies filled with subject-matter experts were in a better position than judges to recognize what is needed to accomplish broad statutory goals like ‘clean air’ and ‘clean water’ and ‘worker safety.’ Now, instead of ‘Science Knows Best,’ we’ll have ‘Father Knows Best.’ Knowledge about chemistry and engineering will give way to knowledge about torts.”
Wisconsin progressive Eric Wilson isn’t an attorney but he’s seeing this very much the way Grayson is. “Now more than ever it’s important to elect Members of Congress with real life experience and first hand knowledge of how industries work,” he told us this afternoon. “With this ruling, my first-hand knowledge of the healthcare, housing and technology sectors is invaluable, as I can actively contribute to regulatory laws passed. My opponents are not as well equipped. We are in a battle for power and we are seeing it more and more that big money and corporations are buying their way to the top. If we don’t fight back aggressively and create laws that will reign in this power grab, the voice of the people will be lost. I’m fighting that fight, and that’s why my slogan is people over profits.”
New Jersey progressive Sue Altman has been a public interest activist for her whole time in “politics,” Now she’s running for Congress and she doesn’t seem to think this Chevron ruling is healthy. “This decision,” she told us this afternoon, “guts the ability of government agencies to regulate everything from the water our kids drink to the safety of our food and prescription drugs. When the health and safety of American families is at risk, experts should be defining policy standards— not politicians and their corporate backers.”
“The legal bombshell arrived Friday, when the six conservatives on the Supreme Court invalidated a decades-old legal precedent that federal judges should defer to regulatory agencies in cases where the law is ambiguous or Congress fails to specify its intentions… Many conservatives and businesses long had chafed over the legal doctrine, known as Chevron deference after a case involving the oil giant in the 1980s. They had encouraged the Supreme Court over the past year to dismantle the precedent in a flood of legal filings, then rejoiced when the nation’s highest judicial panel sided with them this week— paving the way for industry to commence a renewed assault against the power and reach of the executive branch.”
Some of the most powerful corporate interests under the government’s watch predicted the decision might aid in their ongoing legal clashes with the Biden administration over its policies to cancel student debt, improve overtime pay, ensure net neutrality, protect waterways from pollution and enhance investor safeguards, including the government’s nascent work to regulate cryptocurrency.
…While the exact legal implications may take years to untangle, conservative advocates and industry lobbyists— some tied to the Supreme Court fight— signaled they were eager to leverage it or bring fresh lawsuits.
The National Association of Manufacturers, a lobbying group whose board of directors includes top executives from Dow, Caterpillar, ExxonMobil and Johnson & Johnson, specifically called attention to what it described as regulatory overreach at the SEC and the Environmental Protection Agency. The group’s president, Jay Timmons, said in a statement that NAM would soon be “on the field … to fight back new regulations we are facing today as well as whatever may come our way in the next administration.”
The American Bankers Association, meanwhile, said it would “continue to fight to ensure that bank regulators follow the law every time they exercise their powers.” The group, whose members include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, has sued the Biden administration in recent months over rules meant to limit the fees they can charge customers who are late on their credit card payments. (It did not respond to a request for comment.)
And the National Association of Home Builders, which represents thousands of builders and suppliers in the housing industry, said it might benefit from the justices’ decision in a fight with the federal government over new environmental regulations. NAHB has joined with other housing groups to sue the EPA over rules targeting pollution in small waterways, arguing its approach oversteps the agency’s authority and makes it harder to construct new housing.
Tom Ward, the vice president for legal advocacy for the association, said he expected NAHB to “send this opinion” to a judge hearing the water-related case in Texas to “remind the court now there is no deference to the agency.”
The legal wrangling ultimately served to underscore a harsh reality in Washington: Federal agencies increasingly have taken a more active role in crafting policy because of partisan gridlock in Congress. Political divisions often have prevented lawmakers from fully attending to the nation’s most intractable problems, creating a void that the sprawling regulatory bureaucracy has tried to fill, sometimes in ways that draw sharp opposition.
“I’ve sat in the room as legislation has been marked up, and the way legislation gets through many times is to be purposefully imprecise,” said Tom Wheeler, the former Democratic chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who faced a legal onslaught by internet providers over his agency’s work during the Obama administration to interpret its foundational 1930s-era telecom law.
Wheeler said the regulatory gaps have been especially glaring in technology, since Congress has failed to articulate clear new rules on some of the most cutting-edge issues in the digital age. Without guidance from legislation or deference from the courts, federal agencies may now struggle to respond to novel challenges— like the rise of artificial intelligence— as they find themselves newly unable “to address anything unless the Congress addresses it,” he said.
With federal agencies losing a pivotal line of defense, many legal experts, consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers said they feared the consequences could prove wide ranging.
The American Cancer Society joined a wide array of public health groups this week to warn about the prospect of “significant disruption” to insurance programs, federal food and drug review systems and patients’ health. Tax experts previously predicted the end of Chevron could “create a real mess” for the Internal Revenue Service as it looks to implement recent, congressionally mandated changes to the tax code. And some climate advocates, including the nonprofit Climate Power, fretted that the Supreme Court had made it “harder to protect our air and water.”
“Every time the court has taken a step in this direction, we have seen [lawsuits] follow,” said Sharon Block, a professor at Harvard Law School who formerly served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Biden. “They’re now just invitations everywhere to challenge the actions of federal agencies when they’re trying to help people.”
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers said they hoped to accelerate what they saw as the “beginning of the end of the administrative state.” In a joint statement, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) joined other GOP leaders in pledging that the chamber’s committees would soon be “conducting oversight to ensure agencies follow the Court’s ruling and no longer engage in excessive interpretive license in administering statutes under their jurisdiction.”
Before the Supreme Court ruling, Johnson and other Republicans formally submitted a legal brief encouraging the justices to invalidate the precedent set in Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, arguing last July that federal agencies should “possess only those powers given to them by Congress.” On Friday, some GOP lawmakers even circulated a menu of Biden-era policies they hoped to scrutinize, including the administration’s work on “energy and agricultural production” as well as Title IX, an anti-gender-discrimination law that the Department of Education recently expanded to protect transgender students.
“It’s time for lawmakers to take back our legislative power,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), the author of the list of policies and leader of the Republican Study Committee, the largest block of GOP lawmakers in the chamber. “This is an opportunity for us to be better legislators— and ensure that unelected bureaucrats aren’t doing that job for us.”
State Sen. Chris Larson is one of the most progressive political leaders in Wisconsin. He’s up for reelection in November and I hope you’ll give him a hand. After the Supreme Court announced their latest awful series of rulings, he told us that “While America was pondering the previous night’s debate and what it could forecast for the future of our country, the extremists on the Supreme Court pulled a massive power grab that was decades in the making. The six Justices appointed by Republicans stripped away vital protections for our shared environment, financial markets, consumers, and the workplace. The lawsuits were backed by conservative legal organizations the Cause of Action Institute and New Civil Liberties Alliance, that have received millions of dollars from the billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother, David. Billionaires wined and dined the Republican Justices with luxury vacations, buying houses and motor homes to garner support.”
Larson added that “The ultra wealthy stand to benefit the most at the expense of the rest of us. Tens of thousands of cases relying on the Chevron precedent from here on out will now have to come before the court system to be enforced. This court is as corrupt as it is out of control. Nothing in the constitution says this power grab should be allowed or that the Justices have lifetime appointments. It says ‘good Behaviour.’ Accepting millions in bribes and luxury vacations sure doesn't seem to qualify. U.S. Supreme Court has abandoned any shred of legitimacy and their power grab should not stand. The US Supreme Court has run amok. Nine people, one-third of whom were appointed by a 34-time felon, should not have this much power, and certainly not for life.”
