Republicans claimed that a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision gave the executive branch “too much power” to enact regulations that cost the American people trillions of dollars annually. The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to overturn that decision.

“Lawmakers approved the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or SOPRA, in a mostly party-line 220-211 vote. Republicans have argued for the last several years that the Supreme Court precedent set in the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case effectively told courts that they should defer to federal agencies when they interpret laws passed by Congress as they write regulations. Republicans say that since that ruling, courts have failed to do their due diligence in assessing whether those regulations can be fairly justified under the law,” Fox News reported.

“The lawmaker who sponsored SOPRA, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., argued on the House floor Thursday that the Supreme Court ruling has given the executive branch vast authority to regulate as it pleases, and often in ways that contradict the intent of Congress,” the outlet added.

“Since 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that courts must defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute rather than what Congress intended, the executive branch has begun usurping the legislative branch to issue regulations with the force of law. It is certainly not what our founders intended,” Fitzgerald said.

“The total annual cost of regulation is almost $2 trillion, or about 8% of the U.S. GDP,” he added. “If it were a country, for comparison, U.S. regulation would be the world’s eighth largest economy.”

In opposition to overturning the Supreme Court’s judgment, Democrats argued that doing so would place an enormous burden on the courts as they interpret federal law.

Representative Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, claimed that the legislation would “completely upend the administrative process by eliminating judicial deference to agencies and require federal courts to review all agency rulemaking and interpretations of the statute on a de novo basis.”

“While Congress sets broad policies, we delegate authorities to executive agencies because we do not have the expertise to craft the technical regulations ourselves, and we rely on these agencies to carry out the policies we enact,” Nadler said.

Recently, the Supreme Court has been in the news.

Thursday, in what some are calling a “landmark” decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a provision that gives preference in child custody cases to the placement of Native American children with Native families or tribes.

“The law was passed in 1978 to protect tribal sovereignty after Congress documented the alarmingly high number of children with Native American ancestry being placed with non-Native families or institutions in state child welfare and private adoption proceedings. The 7-2 decision backs the law passed in the wake of decades of hostility on the part of the federal government when it comes to child custody issues and the traditional values of Indian tribes,” CNN reported.

More on this story via The Republic Brief:

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated that Congress did not go beyond its legal power when it passed the statute. CONTINUE READING…