Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Page Number: 74.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

27 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

This Court upheld the EPA’s definition as consistent with
the governing statute.  Id., at 866.  The decision, issued by
a bare quorum of the Court, without concurrence or dissent,
purported to apply “well-settled principles.”  Id., at 845.  “If 
a  court,  employing  traditional  tools  of  statutory  construc-
tion, ascertains that Congress had an intention on the pre-
cise question at issue,” Chevron provided, then “that inten-
tion is the law and must be given effect.”  Id., at 843, n. 9. 
Many  of  the  cases  Chevron  cited  to  support  its  judgment
stood  for  the  traditional  proposition  that  courts  afford  re-
spectful consideration, not deference, to executive interpre-
tations of the law.  See, e.g., Burnet, 285 U. S., at 16; United 
States v. Moore, 95 U. S. 760, 763 (1878).  And the decision’s 
sole citation to legal scholarship was to Roscoe Pound, who 
long championed de novo judicial review.  467 U. S., at 843, 
n. 10; see R. Pound, The Place of the Judiciary in a Demo-
cratic Polity, 27 A. B. A. J. 133, 136–137 (1941). 

At  the  same  time,  of  course,  the  opinion  contained  bits 
and  pieces  that  spoke  differently.    The  decision  also  said 
that, “if [a] statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to [a] 
specific  issue,  the  question  for  the  court  is  whether  the 
agency’s  answer  is  based  on  a  permissible  construction  of 
the statute.”  467 U. S., at 843.   But it seems the govern-
ment didn’t advance this formulation in its brief, so there 
was no adversarial engagement on it.  T. Merrill, The Story
of Chevron: The Making of an Accidental Landmark, 66 Ad-
min. L. Rev. 253, 268 (2014) (Merrill).  As we have seen, too, 
the Court did not pause to consider (or even mention) the 
APA.  See Part II–A, supra.  It did not discuss contrary prec-
edents issued by the Court since the founding, let alone pur-
port to overrule any of them.  See Part II–B–1, supra.  Nor 
did the Court seek to address how its novel rule of deference 
might be squared with so much surrounding law.  See Part 
II–B–2, supra.  As even its defenders have acknowledged, 
“Chevron barely bothered to justify its rule of deference, and
the few brief passages on this matter pointed in disparate