Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Page Number: 39

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

31 

Opinion of the Court 

beholder,” Exxon Mobil Corp., 545 U. S., at 572 (Stevens, J.,
dissenting),  invites  different  results  in  like  cases  and  is
therefore  “arbitrary  in  practice,”  Gulfstream  Aerospace 
Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U. S. 271, 283 (1988).  Such 
an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand as 
an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority be-
tween courts and agencies.  Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 
U. S. 111, 125 (1965).

The  dissent  proves  the  point.  It  tells  us  that  a  court 
should  reach  Chevron’s  second  step  when  it  finds,  “at  the
end of its interpretive work,” that “Congress has left an am-
biguity  or  gap.”    Post,  at  1–2.  (The  Government  offers  a
similar  test.  See  Brief  for  Respondents  in  No.  22–1219, 
pp. 7,  10,  14;  Tr.  of  Oral  Arg.  113–114,  116.)    That  is  no 
guide at all.  Once more, the basic nature and meaning of a 
statute does not change when an agency happens to be in-
volved.  Nor does it change just because the agency has hap-
pened to offer its interpretation through the sort of proce-
dures  necessary  to  obtain  deference,  or  because  the  other 
preconditions for Chevron happen to be satisfied.  The stat-
ute  still  has  a  best  meaning,  necessarily  discernible  by  a 
court deploying its full interpretive toolkit.  So for the dis-
sent’s test to have any  meaning, it must think that in an 
agency case (unlike in any other), a court should give up on 
its  “interpretive  work”  before  it  has  identified  that  best 
meaning.  But how does a court know when to do so?  On 
that point, the dissent leaves a gap of its own.  It protests
only that some other interpretive tools—all with pedigrees 
more robust than Chevron’s, and all designed to help courts
identify the meaning of a text rather than allow the Execu-
tive Branch to displace it—also apply to ambiguous texts.
See  post,  at  27.  That  this  is  all  the  dissent  can  come  up 
with, after four decades of judicial experience attempting to
identify ambiguity under Chevron, reveals the futility of the