On June 28, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturning the 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council which has for 40 years served as a shield for administrative agencies to make interpretations of the law while escaping meaningful judicial review. Essentially, Chevron gave agencies extreme latitude to come to their own conclusions about what the law requires, holding that if a statute is at all “ambiguous,” the courts should defer to a “reasonable” agency interpretation. For years, concerns have abounded about who decides when a statute is sufficiently ambiguous for an agency to step in and provide its own definition, or where the outer bounds of a “reasonable” interpretation lie.
This reasoning, which became known as the Chevron doctrine, had already been under fire from SCOTUS in recent years, leading many to speculate that the doctrine’s days were numbered. The Supreme Court has not applied the doctrine since 2016, demonstrating that the current court has long been skeptical of its validity. Additionally, the Court decided in a 2022 case, West Viriginia v. EPA, that an agency interpretation was not entitled to deference if it concerned questions of great political or economic significance, conveying a longstanding frustration with agency overreach and executive lawmaking.
The current ruling makes it abundantly clear that deciding what the law means is a question for courts, not agency personnel. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts states that agency interpretations of statutes, just like agency interpretations of the Constitution, are unequivocally not entitled to judicial deference under any circumstances, although the courts may consider such interpretations under the much less deferential Skidmore standard.
Chevron deference has had a significant impact on firearms regulation and litigation in the past. In Guedes v. BATFE, a case in which Chief Counsel Joshua Prince represented a petitioner bringing a challenge to the administrative bump stock ban issued by the Trump administration, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban, citing Chevron to justify deferring to the agency’s “reasonable” interpretation that bump stocks were machine guns.
Although the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Guedes has been obsoleted by SCOTUS’ recent decision in Garland v. Cargill, making their reliance on Chevron a moot point, it’s demonstrative of how deference to the opinions of administrative agencies like the ATF can imperil the rights of American citizens. While the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in this case, Justice Gorsuch wrote an opinion at the time in which he expressed serious concerns about the application of Chevron deference to such a rule
Deference to administrative agency interpretations also touches on other current hot-button issues in firearms regulation, such as ongoing litigation over ATF’s rule classifying certain unfinished components, commonly known as “80% lowers,” as “frames or receivers” regulated under the Gun Control Act if they can be “readily converted” into a functional part. This follows a nationwide campaign against so-called “ghost guns,” spreading concerns that legal private manufacturing of firearms for personal use is a danger to the public.
While the ATF has veered away from arguing reliance on the Chevron doctrine in recent years, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall in advance of this most recent decision, such a decisive condemnation of administrative agency deference is still likely to impact future judicial decisions when it comes to the ATF “reclassifying” certain components overnight without any change in the underlying statute.
Many who have wound up on the wrong side of the ATF’s arbitrary rulemaking powers in recent years – and there are more than a few – may now have new opportunities to bring challenges to the enforcement of regulations for which ATF never had statutory authorization and inserted its own interpretations in order to “fill in the gaps” left by Congress. Particularly, in light of repeated agency flip-flopping on crucial issues and SCOTUS’ pronounced distaste for allowing the shifting political winds to dictate the interpretation of the law, there is more reason than ever to doubt whether many of these regulations should have ever been upheld.
If you would like to discuss your rights in light of this decision, contact FICG today to discuss your options.
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