In the wake of the recent OIO decision, separation of powers issues should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. In reaching its decision, the DC Circuit relied upon Chevron to justify its extreme deference to the FCC. The court held, for instance, that
Our job is to ensure that an agency has acted “within the limits of [Congress’s] delegation” of authority… and that its action is not “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”… Critically, we do not “inquire as to whether the agency’s decision is wise as a policy matter; indeed, we are forbidden from substituting our judgment for that of the agency.”… Nor do we inquire whether “some or many economists would disapprove of the [agency’s] approach” because “we do not sit as a panel of referees on a professional economics journal, but as a panel of generalist judges obliged to defer to a reasonable judgment by an agency acting pursuant to congressionally delegated authority.
The DC Circuit’s decision takes a broad view of Chevron deference and, in so doing, ignores or dismisses some of the limits placed upon the doctrine by cases like Michigan v. EPA and UARG v. EPA (though Judge Williams does bring up UARG in dissent).
Whatever one thinks of the validity of the FCC’s approach to regulating the Internet, there is no question that it has, at best, a weak statutory foothold. Without prejudging the merits of the OIO, or the question of deference to agencies that find “[regulatory] elephants in [statutory] mouseholes,” such broad claims of authority, based on such limited statutory language, should give one pause. That the court upheld the FCC’s interpretation of the Act without expressing reservations, suggesting any limits, or admitting of any concrete basis for challenging the agency’s authority beyond circular references to “abuse of discretion” is deeply troubling.
Separation of powers is a fundamental feature of our democracy, and one that has undoubtedly contributed to the longevity of our system of self-governance. Not least among the important features of separation of powers is the ability of courts to review the lawfulness of legislation and executive action.
The founders presciently realized the dangers of allowing one part of the government to centralize power in itself. In Federalist 47, James Madison observed that
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. (emphasis added)
The modern administrative apparatus has become the sort of governmental body that the founders feared and that we have somehow grown to accept. The FCC is not alone in this: any member of the alphabet soup that constitutes our administrative state, whether “independent” or otherwise, is typically vested with great, essentially unreviewable authority over the economy and our daily lives.
As Justice Thomas so aptly put it in his must-read concurrence in Michigan v. EPA:
Perhaps there is some unique historical justification for deferring to federal agencies, but these cases reveal how paltry an effort we have made to understand it or to confine ourselves to its boundaries. Although we hold today that EPA exceeded even the extremely permissive limits on agency power set by our precedents, we should be alarmed that it felt sufficiently emboldened by those precedents to make the bid for deference that it did here. As in other areas of our jurisprudence concerning administrative agencies, we seem to be straying further and further from the Constitution without so much as pausing to ask why. We should stop to consider that document before blithely giving the force of law to any other agency “interpretations” of federal statutes.
Administrative discretion is fantastic — until it isn’t. If your party is the one in power, unlimited discretion gives your side the ability to run down a wish list, checking off controversial items that could never make it past a deliberative body like Congress. That same discretion, however, becomes a nightmare under extreme deference as political opponents, newly in power, roll back preferred policies. In the end, regulation tends toward the extremes, on both sides, and ultimately consumers and companies pay the price in the form of excessive regulatory burdens and extreme uncertainty.
In theory, it is (or should be) left to the courts to rein in agency overreach. Unfortunately, courts have been relatively unwilling to push back on the administrative state, leaving the task up to Congress. And Congress, too, has, over the years, found too much it likes in agency power to seriously take on the structural problems that give agencies effectively free reign. At least, until recently.
In March of this year, Representative Ratcliffe (R-TX) proposed HR 4768: the Separation of Powers Restoration Act (“SOPRA”). Arguably this is first real effort to fix the underlying problem since the 1995 “Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act” (although, it should be noted, SOPRA is far more targeted than was the CRRA). Under SOPRA, 5 U.S.C. § 706 — the enacted portion of the APA that deals with judicial review of agency actions — would be amended to read as follows (with the new language highlighted):
(a) To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action and decide de novo all relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions, and rules made by agencies. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, this subsection shall apply in any action for judicial review of agency action authorized under any provision of law. No law may exempt any such civil action from the application of this section except by specific reference to this section.
These changes to the scope of review would operate as a much-needed check on the unlimited discretion that agencies currently enjoy. They give courts the ability to review “de novo all relevant questions of law,” which includes agencies’ interpretations of their own rules.
The status quo has created a negative feedback cycle. The Chevron doctrine, as it has played out, gives outsized incentives to both the federal agencies, as well as courts, to essentially disregard Congress’s intended meaning for particular statutes. Today an agency can write rules and make decisions safe in the knowledge that Chevron will likely insulate it from any truly serious probing by a district court with regards to how well the agency’s action actually matches up with congressional intent or with even rudimentary cost-benefit analysis.
Defenders of the administrative state may balk at changing this state of affairs, of course. But defending an institution that is almost entirely immune from judicial and legal review seems to be a particularly hard row to hoe.
Public Knowledge, for instance, claims that
Judicial deference to agency decision-making is critical in instances where Congress’ intent is unclear because it balances each branch of government’s appropriate role and acknowledges the realities of the modern regulatory state.
To quote Justice Scalia, an unfortunate champion of the Chevron doctrine, this is “pure applesauce.”
The very core of the problem that SOPRA addresses is that the administrative state is not a proper branch of government — it’s a shadow system of quasi-legislation and quasi-legal review. Congress can be chastened by popular vote. Judges who abuse discretion can be overturned (or impeached). The administrative agencies, on the other hand, are insulated through doctrines like Chevron and Auer, and their personnel subject more or less to the political whims of the executive branch.
Even agencies directly under the control of the executive branch — let alone independent agencies — become petrified caricatures of their original design as layers of bureaucratic rule and custom accrue over years, eventually turning the organization into an entity that serves, more or less, to perpetuate its own existence.
Other supporters of the status quo actually identify the unreviewable see-saw of agency discretion as a feature, not a bug:
Even people who agree with the anti-government premises of the sponsors [of SOPRA] should recognize that a change in the APA standard of review is an inapt tool for advancing that agenda. It is shortsighted, because it ignores the fact that, over time, political administrations change. Sometimes the administration in office will generally be in favor of deregulation, and in these circumstances a more intrusive standard of judicial review would tend to undercut that administration’s policies just as surely as it may tend to undercut a more progressive administration’s policies when the latter holds power. The APA applies equally to affirmative regulation and to deregulation.
But presidential elections — far from justifying this extreme administrative deference — actually make the case for trimming the sails of the administrative state. Presidential elections have become an important part about how candidates will wield the immense regulatory power vested in the executive branch.
Thus, for example, as part of his presidential bid, Jeb Bush indicated he would use the EPA to roll back every policy that Obama had put into place. One of Donald Trump’s allies suggested that Trump “should turn off [CNN’s] FCC license” in order to punish the news agency. And VP hopeful Elizabeth Warren has suggested using the FDIC to limit the growth of financial institutions, and using the FCC and FTC to tilt the markets to make it easier for the small companies to get an advantage over the “big guys.”
Far from being neutral, technocratic administrators of complex social and economic matters, administrative agencies have become one more political weapon of majority parties as they make the case for how their candidates will use all the power at their disposal — and more — to work their will.
As Justice Thomas, again, noted in Michigan v. EPA:
In reality…, agencies “interpreting” ambiguous statutes typically are not engaged in acts of interpretation at all. Instead, as Chevron itself acknowledged, they are engaged in the “formulation of policy.” Statutory ambiguity thus becomes an implicit delegation of rulemaking authority, and that authority is used not to find the best meaning of the text, but to formulate legally binding rules to fill in gaps based on policy judgments made by the agency rather than Congress.
And this is just the thing: SOPRA would bring far-more-valuable predictability and longevity to our legal system by imposing a system of accountability on the agencies. Currently, commissions often believe they can act with impunity (until the next election at least), and even the intended constraints of the APA frequently won’t do much to tether their whims to statute or law if they’re intent on deviating. Having a known constraint (or, at least, a reliable process by which judicial constraint may be imposed) on their behavior will make them think twice about exactly how legally and economically sound proposed rules and other actions are.
The administrative state isn’t going away, even if SOPRA were passed; it will continue to be the source of the majority of the rules under which our economy operates. We have long believed that a benefit of our judicial system is its consistency and relative lack of politicization. If this is a benefit for interpreting laws when agencies aren’t involved, it should also be a benefit when they are involved. Particularly as more and more law emanates from agencies rather than Congress, the oversight of largely neutral judicial arbiters is an essential check on the administrative apparatus’ “accumulation of all powers.”
The interest of judges tends to include a respect for the development of precedent that yields consistent and transparent rules for all future litigants and, more broadly, for economic actors and consumers making decisions in the shadow of the law. This is markedly distinct from agencies which, more often than not, promote the particular, shifting, and often-narrow political sentiments of the day.
Whether a Republican- or a Democrat— appointed district judge reviews an agency action, that judge will be bound (more or less) by the precedent that came before, regardless of the judge’s individual political preferences. Contrast this with the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, for example, where previously it had been committed to the idea that broadband was an information service, subject to an entirely different — and far less onerous — regulatory regime. Of course, the next FCC Chairman may feel differently, and nothing would stop another regulatory shift back to the pre-OIO status quo. Perhaps more troublingly, the enormous discretion afforded by courts under current standards of review would permit the agency to endlessly tweak its rules — forbearing from some regulations but not others, un-forbearing, re-interpreting, etc., with precious few judicial standards available to bring certainty to the rules or to ensure their fealty to the statute or the sound economics that is supposed to undergird administrative decisionmaking.
SOPRA, or a bill like it, would have required the Commission to actually be accountable for its historical regulations, and would force it to undergo at least rudimentary economic analysis to justify its actions. This form of accountability can only be to the good.
The genius of our system is its (potential) respect for the rule of law. This is an issue that both sides of the aisle should be able to get behind: minority status is always just one election cycle away. We should all hope to see SOPRA — or some bill like it — gain traction, rooted in long-overdue reflection on just how comfortable we are as a polity with a bureaucratic system increasingly driven by unaccountable discretion.