Experts say the Supreme Court struck a shattering blow to the delicate scales that balance political powers in Washington D.C. Monday — before they even released the ruling on presidential immunity.
Moments before the court issued its historic verdict ruling on former President Donald Trump's defense in his federal criminal trials, the nine justices revealed their ruling on a truck stop convenience store's challenge to debit card fees.
"It's a really big deal," wrote Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern. "Today's outcome in Corner Post will be so destabilizing to the administrative state — it means that agency actions are never really safe from legal assault, even decades after they're finalized."
At first glance, the case appears to be a small business versus big government case, but an analysis from the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan policy institute, paints another picture.
That's because Corner Post — propped up by "massive trade associations" — challenges more than debit card swipe fees, but the precedent that limits when a federal law can face legal challenge, the American Progress researchers write.
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"This tenuous reading of the law would effectively eliminate the statute of limitations ... to challenge federal rules as facially illegal, arbitrary, or capricious, potentially resulting in an unending stream of lawsuits challenging rules that have been on the books protecting and benefiting everyday Americans," the researchers write.
"Corner Post is intended to allow a swarm of legal challenges to rules that have protected the American people from bad actors and corporate malfeasance for decades."
This ruling arrived days after the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent that mandated courts must defer to government agencies’s interpretation of statutes: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce.
The vote was 6-3 in the former and 6-2 in the latter, from which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused, to overrule the court's 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
Jackson referenced the rulings again in the Corner Post dissent she authored.
"A fixed statute of limitations, running from the agency's action, was one barrier to the chaotic upending of settled agency rule," wrote Jackson.
"The requirement that deference be given to an agency's reasonable interpretations concerning its statutory authority to issue rules was another. The Court has now eliminated both."
Jackson's predictions are dire, saying the rulings in total have "the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government."
Washington Post opinion write Jen Rubin agreed.
"This court is in the chaos," Rubin wrote of the nation's highest court. "Like a bull in a china shop of our democracy."
