Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
Page Number: 73

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

17 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

the relevant statutory provisions as negating the agency’s 
claimed authority.  See id., at 160 (“[W]e are obliged to defer 
not  to  the  agency’s  expansive  construction  of  the  statute,
but to Congress’ consistent judgment to deny the FDA this
power”);  id.,  at  133  (finding  at  Chevron’s  first  step  that
“Congress  has  directly  spoken  to  the  issue  here  and  pre-
cluded the FDA’s” asserted power).  In reaching that con-
clusion, the Court relied (as I’ve just explained) not on any 
special “clear authorization” demand, but on normal princi-
ples of statutory interpretation: look at the text, view it in 
context,  and  use  what  the  Court  called  some  “common 
sense”  about  how  Congress  delegates.    Ibid.  That  is  how 
courts are to decide, in the majority’s language, whether an 
agency has asserted a “highly consequential power beyond 
what  Congress  could  reasonably  be  understood  to  have
granted.”  Ante, at 20. 

The Court has applied the same kind of analysis in sub-
sequent cases—holding in each that an agency exceeded the 
scope of a broadly framed delegation when it operated out-
side the sphere of its expertise, in a way that warped the 
statutory text or structure.  In Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U. S. 
243 (2006), we rejected the Attorney General’s assertion of 
authority (under a broad “public interest” standard) to re-
scind doctors’ registrations for facilitating assisted suicide, 
even  in  States  where  doing  so  was  legal.  See id.,  at  243, 
248–249, 261–275.  We doubted Congress would have dele-
gated such a “quintessentially medical judgment[ ]” to “an
executive official who lacks medical expertise.”  Id., at 266– 
267.  And we pointed to statutory provisions in which Con-
gress—in opposition to the claimed power—had “painstak-
ingly described the Attorney General’s limited authority” to
deregister physicians.  Id., at 262.3 
—————— 

3 Similarly,  in  King  v.  Burwell,  576  U. S.  473  (2015),  we  relied  on 
Brown & Williamson in declining to defer to the Internal Revenue Ser-
vice’s construction of the Affordable Care Act.  We thought it highly “un-
likely that Congress would have delegated” an important decision about