Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan slammed a decision Friday that empowers the courts to ignore federal agencies by undermining agencies’ authority to interpret their own statutes.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines in McLaughlin v. McKesson, the Supreme Court held that the Hobbs Act did not require federal courts to abide by the Federal Communications Commission’s interpretation of a law restricting telemarketing—and that it should be left to the courts to decide the law’s meaning.
In a scathing dissent, Kagan argued that the court’s conclusion to rely on a “default rule” that allows lower courts to decide whether a statutory interpretation was correct in enforcement proceedings was “wrong.”
“The text of the Hobbs Act makes clear that litigants who have declined to seek preenforcement judicial review may not contest the statutory validity of agency action in later district-court enforcement proceedings,” she wrote. “And this Court’s prior decisions have said just that.”
“Today’s majority evades the Hobbs Act’s most natural meaning by relying on a novel ‘default rule,’ which demands that Congress use a certain form of words—really, that Congress create statutory redundancy—to preclude parties from bringing down-the-road challenges to agency action.”
“That rule has no foundation in our law; it emerges fully formed today from the majority’s head. And it prevents the Hobbs Act from functioning as Congress wanted—by allowing regulated parties to end-run the Act’s pre-enforcement judicial review scheme, and thereby undermine the stability and efficacy of administrative programs,” she wrote.
The FCC had split federal courts after it issued an order excluding “online fax service” from the definition of “telephone facsimile machine” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. In the majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh found that “the Hobbs Act does not bind district courts in civil enforcement proceedings to an agency’s interpretation of a statute.”
“District courts must independently determine the law’s meaning under ordinary principles of statutory interpretation while affording appropriate respect to the agency’s interpretation,” he said.
Friday’s ruling could unleash a spate of additional lawsuits against the FCC, as litigants will attempt to test whether they have to comply with any FCC regulation under the TCPA.
Last year, the court ruled to overturn the Chevron deference, a 40-year-old doctrine that required judges to defer to a federal agency when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce. The decision was criticized as judicial overreach.
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