Attached Instrument: Page 9
1 Cite as: 598 U. S. ____ (2022)
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
THOMAS H. BUFFINGTON v. DENIS R. MCDONOUGH,
SECRETARY OF VETERAN AFFAIRS
ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED
STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FEDERAL CIRCUIT
No. 21–972. Decided November 7, 2022
9
Cite as: 598 U. S. ____ (2022)
…..the APA and our longstanding and never-overruled precedent. It also turns out to pose a serious threat to some of our most fundamental commitments as judges and courts.
In this country, we like to boast that persons who come to court are entitled to have independent judges, not politically motivated actors, resolve their rights and duties under law. Here, we promise, individuals may appeal to neutral magistrates to resolve their disputes about “what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Everyone, we say, is entitled to a judicial decision “without respect to persons,” 28 U. S. C. §453, and a “fair trial in a fair tribunal,” In re Murchison, 349 U. S. 133, 136 (1955).
Under a broad reading of Chevron, however, courts often fail to deliver on all these promises. Rather than provide individuals with the best understanding of their rights and duties under law a neutral magistrate can muster, we outsource our interpretive responsibilities. Rather than say what the law is, we tell those who come before us to go ask a bureaucrat. In the process, we introduce into judicial proceedings a “systematic bias toward one of the parties.” P. Hamburger, Chevron Bias, 84 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1187, 1212 (2016). Nor do we exhibit bias in favor of just any party. We place a finger on the scales of justice in favor of the most powerful of litigants, the federal government, and against everyone else. In these ways, a maximalist account of Chevron risks turning Marbury on its head.
Overreading Chevron introduces still other incongruities into our law. Often we insist that it is a basic requirement of due process that “‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’” Williams v. Pennsylvania, 579 U. S. 1, 8–9 (2016). As far back as Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386 (1798), this Court recognized that it would be “against all reason” to “entrust a Legislature” with the power to “mak[e] a man a Judge in his own cause,” and therefore “it cannot be presumed that[the people] have done it,” id., at 388 (opinion of Chase, J.)