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Page Number: 73.0

26 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

It acknowledges that Chevron sits as a heavy weight on the 
scale  in  favor  of  the  government,  “oppositional”  to  many
“categories of individuals.”  Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 22–1219, 
p. 133 (Relentless Tr.).  But, according to the government, 
Chevron deference is too important an innovation to undo.
In its brief reign, the government says, it has become a “fun-
damenta[l] . . . ground rul[e] for how all three branches of 
the  government  are  operating  together.”    Relentless  Tr. 
102.  But,  in  truth,  the  Constitution,  the  APA,  and  our 
longstanding precedents set those ground rules some time 
ago.  And under them, agencies cannot invoke a judge-made
fiction to unsettle our Nation’s promise to individuals that
they are entitled to make their arguments about the law’s 
demands on them in a fair hearing, one in which they stand 
on equal footing with the government before an independ-
ent judge. 

C 
How could a Court, guided for 200 years by Chief Justice
Marshall’s  example,  come  to  embrace  a  counter-Marbury
revolution, one at war with the APA, time honored prece-
dents,  and  so  much  surrounding  law?    To  answer  these 
questions, turn to Lesson 3 and witness the temptation to
endow a stray passage in a judicial decision with extraordi-
nary authority.  Call it “power quoting.” 

Chevron was an unlikely place for a revolution to begin.
The  case  concerned  the  Clean  Air  Act’s  requirement  that
States regulate “stationary sources” of air pollution in their
borders.  See 42 U. S. C. §7401 et seq.  At the time, it was 
an open question whether entire industrial plants or their 
constituent polluting parts counted as “stationary sources.” 
The  Environmental  Protection  Agency  had  defined  entire
plants as sources, an approach that allowed companies to 
replace  individual  plant  parts  without  automatically  trig-
gering  the  permitting  requirements  that  apply  to  new 
sources.  Chevron, 467 U. S., at 840.