Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert was widely mocked after Michael Regan, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, laughed to her face over her complete misunderstanding of a recent Supreme Court ruling overturning its own Chevron deference decision from the 80s.
In the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine, a 40-year-old precedent that allowed federal agencies the discretion to interpret ambiguous laws within their areas of expertise.
The Chevron deference rule, referenced in more than 7,000 federal cases, acknowledged that agencies require the flexibility to create reasonable regulations in the absence of explicit congressional guidance.
With Chevron now overturned, and especially if former President Donald Trump wins re-election, Americans are likely to see diminished environmental protections, lower food safety standards, and more relaxed approval processes for new drugs.
You can watch the exchange in the video below.
It all began when Boebert asked Regan the following question:
"I'm asking about the EPA and your rogue bureaucrats that have enacted these unconstitutional regulations. Are you going to repeal them? Are you going to continue to implement them or are you going to stop altogether since it's been overturned?"
To that, Regan responded:
"Do you understand the ruling?"
Boebert replied:
"Do you understand the ruling of the Supreme Court?"
Regan said:
"I do, so your question is ill-formed. We're not going to stop."
Boebert said:
"So you're going to unconstitutionally continue with this rule-making?"
Regan said the EPA will "adhere to the Supreme Court and continue to do our work in accordance [with] the Supreme Court, adding:
"The Supreme Court didn't tell us to repeal anything."
After Boebert once again accused Regan of failing to abide by the ruling by not immediately repealing EPA regulations, Regan laughed in her face and shook his head.
Boebert was swiftly mocked after the footage of her exchange with Regan went viral.
Although the Chevron decision, which supported the Reagan-era EPA's interpretation of the Clean Air Act to relax emissions regulations, was initially praised by conservatives, it later became a target for those aiming to limit the administrative state.
Conservative critics argued that courts, not federal agencies, should interpret the law. The justices had previously rejected requests to reconsider Chevron, including one by a lawyer involved in the current cases, before agreeing last year to review a pair of challenges to a rule from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
In his opinion overturning Chevron deference, Justice Neil Gorsuch said "the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss."
Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, also anticipated criticisms, writing that “all today’s decision means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.” Critics of the decision, however, point to Gorsuch's confusing nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and nitrogen oxide (a toxic air pollutant) in a separate opinion limiting the EPA's ability to regulate pollution as evidence of the perils of replacing agency-level expertise with judicial oversight.
