Source: http://yalejreg.com/nc/gorsuchs-clear-enough-kennedys-anti-reflexive-deference-two-potential-limits-on-chevron-deference/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 18:16:18+00:00

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The headline administrative law opinion coming out of the Supreme Court yesterday was no doubt Justice Kagan’s opinion for the Court in Lucia v. SEC, which held that administrative law judges at the SEC are (at least inferior) officers under the Appointments Clause and thus unconstitutionally appointed by agency officials who are not the head of the agency. SCOTUSblog is running a symposium on the case, including a great post by my colleague Peter Shane in which he coins the term “constitutional dodgeball” to describe the judicial minimalism at play in a number of decisions this Term.
There's nothing but her work in that concurrence – they should've just said, for the reasons given by Mascott, we concur.
First, we have Justice Gorsuch’s “clear enough” approach. In Wisconsin Central Ltd. v. United States, a divided 5-4 Court held that employee stock options are not taxable “compensation” under the Railroad Retirement Tax Act because they are not “money remuneration.” In his dissent, Justice Breyer argued that the federal government had the better interpretation; if that interpretation wasn’t the conclusive one, it should at least receive Chevron deference.
Justice Gorsuch’s more muscular Chevron step one inquiry is not new. This was Justice Scalia’s approach, and it has been adopted by a number of other textualist judges who seldom find statutes ambiguous. Most recently, Judge Kethledge (a SCOTUS shortlister) declared in the pages of the online companion to the Vanderbilt Law Review that in almost a decade on the Sixth Circuit he “personally [has] never had occasion to reach Chevron’s step two in any of my cases, there have been plenty of cases where the agency wanted us to.” For the Scalia-Gorsuch-Kethledge textualists, it is par for the course to find statutes unambiguous at step one and thus not defer to an agency statutory interpretation.
Justice Gorsuch’s framing of the step one inquiry as “clear enough” in Wisconsin Central may well affect how lower courts approach Chevron. This language reminds me a bit of Justice Ginsburg’s “scant sense” exception to Chevron deference expressed in her 2015 opinion for the Court in Mellouli v. Lynch. Perhaps lower courts will interpret “clear enough” as more searching than “clear” or “unambiguous,” thus narrowing the scope of Chevron deference in the circuit courts.
Perhaps the “clear enough” standard will encourage circuit and district judges to lower their thresholds for finding clarity closer to the 50-50 range, thus narrowing the scope of Chevron deference at step one.
Second, we have Justice Kennedy’s concerns against “reflexive deference.” In Pereira v. Sessions, the Court held that a notice to appear that does not include the time or place of the removal proceedings is not a statutory notice to appeal that would trigger the stop-time rule in the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Court refused to apply Chevron deference because it found the statute unambiguous.
As my quotations from Justice Kennedy’s concurrence hopefully underscore, I do not agree with those, like Joshua Matz, who believe Justice Kennedy is calling for Chevron‘s demise. Instead, I find myself agreeing more with Jonathan Adler and Jeff Pojanoswki, who view this call for reconsideration to be more about narrowing Chevron deference.
What would that narrowing look like? As opposed to Justice Gorsuch’s more searching, “clear enough” step one, I’d expect Justice Kennedy to continue Chief Justice Roberts’s narrowing project at Chevron step zero, first articulated in the Chief’s dissent in City of Arlington v. FCC and further developed in the Chief’s opinion for the Court in King v. Burwell. I view this as a context-specific Chevron deference, in which the reviewing court would focus more on the particular statutory ambiguity at issue and ask itself whether Congress would have really intended for that particular issue to be delegated to the agency for decision. To determine congressional intent to delegate by ambiguity, the court would consider the agency’s expertise on the precise issue as well the issue’s economic and political significance, among other factors.
As I have detailed elsewhere, this context-specific approach to Chevron deference finds some support in the empirical realities of how folks in Congress draft statutes and how officials at federal agencies draft regulations that interpret statutes. Such a narrowing also likely has the support of five or maybe even six justices on the Court today.
In sum, yesterday’s decisions in Wisconsin Central and Pereira articulate two different, though not mutually exclusive, avenues for narrowing Chevron deference. Justice Gorsuch’s “clear enough” approach would encourage courts to engage in a more-searching inquiry at step one. Justice Kennedy’s anti-“reflective deference” approach would likely lead to narrowing Chevron‘s domain at step zero. Neither would entail eliminating Chevron deference entirely.
Whether such narrowing of Chevron deference is a good thing is a discussion I’ll save for another day.

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