UNBIASED - June 28, 2024: (Special Report) Supreme Court Drops Chevron Doctrine, Upholds Encampment Bans on the Homeless, and Rules on January 6th Obstruction Charge. Here's What You Need to Know.

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

1. Homeless Encampment Bans: City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson (1:39)2. Chevron Doctrine: Looper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo (6:53)3. January 6th Charge: Fischer vs. United States (13:09)CLICK HERE TO SHOP THE LIMITED DROP 'UNBIASED' HATS!Support ‘UNBIASED’ on Patreon.Watch this episode on YouTube.Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok.All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kick off an exciting football season with BetMGM, an official sportsbook partner of the National Football League. Yard after yard, down after down, the sportsbook born in Vegas gives you the chance to take action to the end zone and celebrate every highlight reel play. And as an official sportsbook partner of the NFL, BetMGM is the best place to fuel your football fandom on every game day. With a variety of exciting features,

BetMGM offers you plenty of seamless ways to jump straight onto the gridiron and to embrace peak sports action. Ready for another season of gridiron glory? What are you waiting for? Get off the bench, into the huddle, and head for the end zone all season long. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance,

call the Conax Ontario helpline at 1-866-531-2600. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back to Unbiased, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis. Welcome back to Unbiased. Today is Friday, June 28th, and this is a special report of sorts. So I had said in yesterday's episode that I wouldn't be back with you until Monday. Obviously, it's Friday and here I am. That is because the Supreme Court released three pretty important decisions today that I want to run through. With that said, I do want to say this episode is going to be structured a little bit different. So typically, you know, I very much have a format to my episodes. It's pretty well planned out. This was, I don't want to say thrown together, but it was put

together relatively quickly. So what's going to happen is I will be explaining the decisions, but I'll be also cutting back to original content when I first explain the background of these cases, just because it still gets you the explanation you need. I don't have to repeat myself. So just know I'll kind of be switching back and forth between old footage and today's explanation. What else do I have for you? Obviously, last night was the presidential

debate. Thank you to those of you who joined me live to watch it on Instagram. I also have my hats that are for sale. I don't have one in front of me right now, so I can't show you if you're watching on YouTube, but I'll put a picture on the screen. They're my unbiased hats. They will only be available through this weekend, so if you haven't snagged one yet, you're going to want to do that. It's a limited drop. I'm not going to be recycling the design. So definitely snag one of those. You can get it on unbiasedshop.com. And with that, I think we can get into today's decisions. So today the Supreme Court decided what's being called the most important homelessness case before the Supreme Court in decades because it dealt with

how some cities are able to address their homelessness problem. So let's rewind the tapes back to April 22nd. We'll run through a brief background and then we'll talk about the decision. So the question for the court in this case is whether ordinances that ban camping on public property can be applied to homeless people, or whether applying said bans to homeless people constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, given their involuntary homeless status. Now, this is a question that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has grappled with for years, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, just for clarification purposes, has jurisdiction over California, Oregon, Washington State, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, and Arizona. So all of its decisions affect those states. But more recently,

in 2018, the Ninth Circuit heard a case called Martin v. City of Boise. And in that case, the Ninth Circuit held that the Eighth v. City of Boise. And in that case, the Ninth Circuit held that the Eighth Amendment bars the imposition of criminal penalties for sleeping outside by people who are homeless and don't have access to shelter. Shortly after that ruling, three homeless individuals from Grants Pass, Oregon went to court to challenge the ordinance in their city. And what happened is the district court ruled in favor of the homeless and issued an injunction against the city of Grants Pass only as to the ordinance banning sleeping with a blanket on the street. In other words, the district court said that the city could ban the use of tents in public parks,

it could ban public defecation, it could ban, you know, it could ban public urination. It could even limit the amount of bedding material used per individual. But it could not punish a homeless person for sleeping with a blanket on public property because that is necessary to survive cold nights when shelter is unavailable. That violates the Eighth Amendment. That is what the district court said. So the city appealed, and on appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's injunction. And that's when the city of Grants Pass took this case to the Supreme Court, and here we are. So again, the question for the justices was whether city ordinances that ban camping on public property can be applied to homeless people. And today, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said yes. In writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch wrote, quote, But if many other constitutional provisions address what a government may criminalize and how it may go about securing a conviction, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments focuses on what happens next. That clause has always been

considered, and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment a government may impose for the violation of criminal statutes. He continues on and writes, the cruel and unusual punishments clause focuses on the question of what method or kind of punishment a government may impose after a criminal conviction, not on the question whether a government may criminalize particular behavior in the first place or how it may go about securing a conviction for that offense. To the extent the Constitution speaks to those other matters, it does so as we have seen in other provisions. Nor, focusing on the criminal punishments Grant Pass imposes, can we say they qualify as cruel and unusual?

Recall that under the city's ordinances, an initial offense may trigger a civil fine. Repeat offenses may trigger an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park. Only those who later violate an order like that may face a criminal punishment of up to 30 years in jail and a larger fine. None of the city's sanctions qualifies as cruel because none is designed to super add terror, pain, or disgrace. Nor are the city's sanctions unusual because similar punishments have been and remain among the usual modes for punishing offenses throughout the country. Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it. At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal

judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not. The dissenting justices, which were Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, wrote, quote, Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The city of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or rolled up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is

unconscionable and unconstitutional. Punishing people for their status is, quote, cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. So under this ruling, cities across the country can enforce encampment bans and punishments that accompany those bans against homeless individuals without violating the Eighth Amendment. The next case that the court decided was a case called Chevron. This was actually two cases in one decision. Both cases were very similar. And the Supreme Court, in ruling the way it did today, officially overruled 40-year-old precedent called the Chevron Doctrine or Chevron Deference. What the Chevron Doctrine said is that courts have to

defer to a federal agency's interpretation of a statute rather than interpreting the statute themselves so long as the agency's interpretation is reasonable. So under Chevron, courts wouldn't decide the meaning of statutes if federal agencies had the authority to implement that statute and gave a reasonable interpretation the reason it's called the chevron doctrine is because the case that originally laid out this doctrine is called chevron versus natural resources defense council at the time of the chevron ruling the decision wasn't too controversial but critics have always said that the the Chevron doctrine gives the federal government too much authority, and today the Supreme Court agreed.

So this case actually stemmed from a phishing case. Despite being such a niche issue and a niche rule, this decision actually has very broad implications. So let's go through some background from the original explanation in my podcast episode from months ago, and then again, we'll talk about the decision. The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a rule that requires the herring industry to bear the cost of observers on fishing boats. And by the way, you're probably thinking, what does that have to do with this? Because this is a perfect example of a case that is so niche, yet has much larger implications.

A decision here wouldn't just affect the fishing industry. It would affect nearly all industries and policies that the federal agencies oversee, right? But in these cases, both the Court of Appeals for the District Court of Columbia Circuit and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the National Marine Fisheries Services rule because the courts found that under the Chevron doctrine, the agency's interpretation of the rule was a reasonable interpretation, and therefore that stands. So these two fishing companies that challenged this rule took this case to the Supreme Court. And what they said is that the Chevron Doctrine undermines the duty of the courts to say what the law is and also violates federal law, which requires courts to undertake a fresh review of legal questions.

Because under the Chevron Doctrine, the court isn't even answering legal questions because it's just deferring to the agencies, right? So we have the fishing companies against the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is a federal agency. Those are the parties involved in this particular issue. The fishing companies argued that under the Chevron Doctrine, even if all nine Supreme Court justices agree that the fishing company's interpretation of the federal fishing law is better than the National Marine Fisheries Service's interpretation, the justices would still be required to defer to the agency's interpretation so long as that interpretation was reasonable.

And this, they said, is not consistent with the rule of law, and therefore the Chevron Doctrine needs to be overturned. Now, the Biden administration, on the other hand, they want the, or it wants the Chevron Doctrine to remain in place, right? The executive branch, regardless of who's president, wants to hold on to their authority. So they're relying on the doctrine of stare decisis. Now, stare decisis is the doctrine that comes into play when precedent already exists. And what it says is that courts will generally stick to precedent in making their decisions. The literal translation, by the way, of stare decisis is to stand by things decided. Now, obviously, the Supreme Court can overrule prior precedent, but they just have to justify it through certain factors. So in this case, what the Biden administration argued is that the Chevron

doctrine has very deep roots in Supreme Court jurisprudence. It's been around for 40 years and that the court would need a truly extraordinary justification in order to overrule it, which the Biden administration says does not exist here. So in effect, overturning Chevron takes the power away from the executive branch and makes it harder for both the current administration and future administrations to defend their regulatory implementations against legal challenges. In making this decision, the justices looked at the text of the Administrative Procedure Act, which was enacted in 1946 as a quote-unquote check on administrators. And what Section 706 of that act reads is, quote, to the extent necessary

to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action, end quote. The law also requires courts to, quote, hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be not in accordance with the law, end quote. So in writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, quote, the APA thus codifies for agency cases the unremarkable yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury, Marbury versus Madison, that is, that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. It specifies that courts,

not agencies, will decide all relevant questions of law arising on review of agency action, even those involving ambiguous laws, and set aside any such action inconsistent with the law as they interpret it. End quote. Concluding, Chief Justice Roberts writes, quote, Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the executive branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect that delegation while ensuring that the agency acts within it.

But courts need not, and under the APA may not, defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous. End quote. That is Chevron. Now, the final decision of the day was in Fisher. And Fisher has the effect, or the decision from the court today has the effect of dropping indictments against or dropping a charge against many January 6th defendants. So again, let's run through a little bit of background. I'll replay the original episode in which I covered this case, and then we'll get into the decision. Joseph Fisher entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, and was subsequently charged with various crimes, but some of them included assaulting a police officer, disorderly conduct, as well as obstruction of an official proceeding. That last charge, obstruction of an official

proceeding, is what's at issue here. Specifically, what he was charged with was violating Chapter 18, Section 1512, Subsection C of the U.S. Code. And what that says is this. Subsection C1 says it's illegal to corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal a record or document or attempt to do so with the intent to impair the object's availability for use in an official proceeding. Subjection C2 says or to otherwise obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding or attempt to do so. And that word otherwise is going to play a big role here, and I'll explain why in a minute. But Fisher's argument is essentially that this particular law was only

intended to apply to evidence tampering, which Fisher did not do. And this argument was actually adopted by the district court. So the district court, which is the lowest court in a proceeding, had actually dismissed Fisher's obstruction charge based on one of the judge's rulings in a separate case where the judge had found that this particular law only applies to cases that involve evidence tampering that obstructs an official proceeding. The government then took the charge to the appellate court, where the appellate court upheld the conviction, holding that the law actually applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction, not just evidence tampering. Now it is an issue for the Supreme Court. Okay, so with that background, the Supreme Court ruled six to three today in favor of Fisher that the word otherwise is meant to include other acts that one might take to tamper with evidence outside of altering, destroying, concealing or mutilating, which are the specific acts specified in C1. six defendants who are charged or convicted of violating this law would either have their charge

dropped or they'll be entitled to a new hearing depending on the facts of their particular case. In writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, quote, rather than transforming this evidence-focused statute into a one-size-fits-all solution to obstruction of justice, we cabin our reading of subsection C2 in light of the context of C1. Doing so affords proper respect to the prerogatives of Congress in carrying out the quintessentially legislative act of defining crimes and setting the penalties for them. We have long recognized that the power of punishment is vested in the legislative, not the judicial department, and we have as a result traditionally

exercised restraint in assessing the reach of a federal criminal statute. The government's reading of 1512 would intrude on that deliberate arrangement of constitutional authority over federal crimes, giving prosecutors broad discretion to seek a 20-year maximum sentence for acts Congress saw fit to punish only with far shorter terms of imprisonment. For all these reasons, subsection C2's surrounding words suggest that we should not give this otherwise provision the broadest possible meaning. Although the government's all-encompassing interpretation may be literally permissible, it defies the most plausible understanding of why C11 and C-2 are

conjoined. Given that subsection C-2 was enacted to address the Enron disaster, not some further flung set of dangers, it is unlikely that Congress responded with such an unfocused and grossly incommensurate patch. We therefore decline to adopt the government's interpretation, which is inconsistent with the context from which the statute arose. End quote. The dissenting justices in this case were Justices Barrett, Sotomayor, and Kagan. And they wrote in the dissent, quote, The court does not dispute that the Congress's joint session qualifies as an official proceeding, that rioters delayed the proceeding, or even that Fisher's alleged conduct, which includes trespassing and

a physical confrontation with law enforcement, was part of a successful effort to forcibly halt the certification of the election results. Given these premises, the case that Fisher can be tried for obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding seems open and shut. So why does the court hold otherwise? Because it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said. Section 1512c2 is a very broad provision, and admittedly, events like January 6th were not its target. Who would blame Congress for that failure of imagination? But statutes often go further than the problem that inspired them, and under the rules of statutory interpretation, we stick to the text anyway. The court, abandoning that approach, does textual backflips to find some way, anyway, to narrow the reach of subsection C2, end quote.

So that was the majority and dissent in Fisher. Those were the cases released today. Now, the presidential immunity decision is coming on Monday. Monday is the last day of the court's term. Presidential immunity case has yet to be decided. So stay tuned for Monday. I will be covering that case in, or that decision, I should say, in great detail. Have a great weekend, and I will talk to you on Monday.