The Supreme Court’s Friday news dump

But coming just 12 hours after President Joe Biden’s implosion on the debate stage, these cases won’t get nearly the attention they deserve. Not only are each of the cases newsworthy, but they were all also correctly decided, demonstrating once again the value of putting originalist justices on the bench.

The most far-reaching case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, centered on a small family-owned fishing business in New Jersey. First passed in 1976 to prevent the overfishing of the first 200 nautical miles of ocean from the coast of the United States, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act established eight regional fishery management councils charged with the development and enforcement of fishery management plans for their sector.

To ensure the fishery management plans were being followed, the act empowered the Commerce Department to place inspectors on fishing vessels, but it only forced three kinds of boats to pay for those inspectors (foreign boats, boats fishing for a specific type of fish, and boats in the North Pacific Council). The Loper Bright fishing company was domestic, did not fish the species targeted by the act, and was in New Jersey, not part of the North Pacific Council. 

For decades, New Jersey fishermen had no problem allowing inspectors onto their boats when instructed, but then Congress did not provide enough funding for inspectors, so the Commerce Department issued a new regulation forcing fishermen to pay for their own inspectors. The fishermen cried foul, said Congress never authorized the Commerce Department to impose these costs, and sued to stop the new regulation in federal court.

The Biden administration argued that even though Congress never specifically authorized the  Commerce Department to force fishermen to pay for their own inspection, Congress did allow the department to make the fishermen pay in other circumstances. The Biden administration argued that this created ambiguity in the statute, and under a doctrine known as Chevron deference, the executive branch was therefore empowered to enforce the statute as it saw fit. The majority disagreed, finding that Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council was wrongly decided in 1984. 

Government agencies, such as the Commerce Department, did not have the power to issue regulations until some Supreme Court rulings during the New Deal. Congress then responded by passing the Administrative Procedure Act, which created the legal framework for how courts would review executive branch rulemaking. This system worked fine until 1984, when the Supreme Court greatly expanded executive power by limiting judicial oversight of executive decisions with Chevron. 

In Friday’s Loper Bright decision, the Supreme Court took that power back from the bureaucracy, returning questions of law to the federal courts. No longer will agencies such as the Commerce Department look for any small ambiguity in a statute and then use that as an excuse to create brand-new laws Congress never intended. Democrats warn that the overturning of Chevron will destroy the administrative state, but federal agencies enforced federal law just fine before 1984 and they will continue to do so after Friday.

In a somewhat more localized but perhaps more emotional case, the Supreme Court held that the 9th Circuit erred when it used the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” to create a brand-new right to vagrancy that has fueled the homelessness crisis in the Western United States.

Many communities are facing record-high homelessness today, but half of all homeless people live in California, and the five states with the highest homelessness rates (California, Oregon, Hawaii, Arizona, and Nevada) all fall under the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction.

To help shrink their homeless population, the city of Boise had passed a law that made it a misdemeanor to camp or sleep on public property without permission. Funded and organized by a far-left nonprofit organization, a group of homeless plaintiffs claimed the law violated their Eighth Amendment rights because it punished them for their identity as homeless people, which they said was “cruel and unusual.” A panel of the 9th Circuit bought that argument and a slew of lawsuits quickly spread across the West to try invalidating anti-vagrancy statutes while ushering in a wave of homeless encampments that have proven to be vectors of disease, substance abuse, and crime.

In Friday’s ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court overturned that 9th Circuit decision, holding that the Eighth Amendment only dealt with the “method or kind of punishment” for a crime, not what behavior a government could criminalize. The majority noted that Grants Pass’s penalties for illegal camping, fines, then a ban from public parks, then jail if the ban is violated, were not in themselves cruel or unusual.

While Democrats may claim that the conservative majority of the court was bent on a power grab with the Loper Bright decision, the Grants Pass decision shows the court is only trying to seek the proper balance of legislative, judicial, and executive powers. Federal judges do not have the expertise or the legitimacy to micromanage how each community should deal with its homeless population. This is best left to elected mayors and city councils. Thanks to Grants Pass, cities now have the tools they need to address the homelessness crisis. 

Finally, in Fischer v. United States, the court held that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, passed in response to the destruction of financial documents during the Enron scandal, could not be used to prosecute people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The defendant in Fischer was convicted on six counts of assaulting a federal officer, entering a restricted building, and engaging in disorderly conduct, and he did not challenge those convictions, for which he faced up to eight years in prison. The defendant did challenge, however, a seventh count which charged him with “impeding an official proceeding” under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a crime that carries a penalty of 20 years in prison.

Normally, this statute is used as Congress intended, to prosecute those who impede financial fraud trials by destroying documents. But Biden’s Justice Department has creatively used the statute to prosecute Jan. 6 defendants who, while they had other malicious intent, were not trying to destroy documents. 

The majority held that the Biden Justice Department application of the Sarbanes-Oxley statute outside of the financial fraud context, and into the disruption of any official proceeding, was too big a stretch. As the majority noted, and the Biden administration conceded, the Justice Department’s reading of the statute would criminalize the peaceful protest of any congressional hearing. This is not what Congress intended, and the court was right to vacate the charges.

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The Fischer case is particularly bad news for special counsel Jack Smith, who was relying on the Sarbanes-Oxley statute for half of his case against former President Donald Trump.

The common strand running through all of these cases is the proper reading of original legal authority — in the case of Loper Bright, the Administrative Procedure Act; in the case of Grants Pass, the Eighth Amendment; and in the case of Fischer, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — to the intended meaning of the original text. Thanks to the current conservative majority, no more will courts abuse their power to create new privileges or obligations that never existed before and were not approved through the legislative process.