JOHN EASTMAN: Supreme Court should reverse the 9th Circuit’s flawed deference to administrative state.

Encino Motorcars demonstrates the pervasive effects of repeated abdications to the administrative state. An agency is capable of upending decades of clear legal guidance without any input from Congress, and without any regard for the erosion of legal certainty and predictability. And the lower courts, so used to passive review of agency action, will exercise a sort of phantom deference to agency interpretations even when the Supreme Court specifically instructs the lower court not to do so.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court, applying the standard tools of statutory construction, will give the act a plain reading to restore the citizenry’s settled expectations.

Hopefully indeed.