In a 6-3 decision the Supreme Court’s conservative justices found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) overstepped its authority in prohibiting a gun accessory known as a bump stock that enables a rifle to fire at a rate nearly that of a machine gun. The decision struck down a Trump administration BATFE ruling that banned bump stocks. It was put in place after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history when a Las Vegas gunman in 10 minutes in 2017 killed 60 people and wounded 500 at a concert with rifles upgraded with a bump stock. This absurd ruling, which defies common sense, will undercut future efforts on the part of regulatory agencies to prevent the slaughter of innocent lives. The conservative majority overturned the ban on bump stocks on the basis of a technicality.  Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court’s majority “A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.” The fact that this forced-reset trigger mechanism allows a shooter to fire more than 900 rounds in a minute, just like a legislatively prohibited machine gun, was somehow lost on Justice Thomas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a blistering dissent wrote: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” Justice Sotomayer mocked the suggestion that there were any difficult questions raised by the ban on bump stocks. “This is not a hard case,” Sotomayor wrote, “All the textual evidence points to the same interpretation. A bump-stock equipped semi-automatic rifle is a machine gun because (1) with a single pull of the trigger, a shooter can (2) fire continuous shots without any human input beyond maintaining forward pressure.” Sotomayer rejected the argument that a semiautomatic weapon that behaves just like a machine gun is not, practically speaking the same thing.  “The majority’s artificially narrow definition,” she wrote, “hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” This decision in the Garland v. Cragill case is one of a growing number by the ultra-conservative majority designed to trim back the executive branch’s ability to address through regulations key issues of our time in the absence of congressional action.  For those who feel the Supreme Court showed a callous disregard for human life in the bump stock ruling, the conservative majority has a simple remedy which is contained in Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion.  There is “a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns. Congress can amend the law.” Last year there was an unsuccessful attempt in Congress to pass bump stock legislation.  It was sponsored by 146 House members, all of them Democrats.  Not a single Republican supported the action. The June 2024 rulings in the bump stocks case and the Court’s landmark decision in Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned the landmark Chevon USA v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. case, sent a clear message that the Robert’s Court no longer intends to abide by the federal judiciary’s forty-year-old practice of deferring to federal agencies reasonable interpretations of ambiguous federal laws. The Court no longer feels any compulsion to defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a law or a statute. Instead, the Court held in Lopes-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the Chevron doctrine was inconsistent with the Administrative Procedures Act and gave unelected government officials too much authority. Courts can now determine for themselves whether agencies have adopted the most accurate interpretation of federal law. In his majority opinion, Justice Roberts writes agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities   while courts do.”  The crux of Roberts’ view is that government agencies with their engineers, economists, and scientists do not have any special expertise regarding the rules and regulations they promulgate, and this authority should be housed with the court and they should determine the best meaning of federal laws, including when adjudicating challenges to agency regulations. Justice Kagan captured the significance of the court’s arrogant anti-regulatory ruling in her dissent: “in one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue, no matter how expertise-driven or policy laden, involving the meaning of regulatory law…”, adding that “in every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role.” Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan on July 9, 2024 in Eye on the Market wrote the following about the implication of the ruling in the healthcare field: “The following issues have been handled by agencies for many years, but new interpretive disputes that arise might be resolved by the courts instead: routine Medicare reimbursements updates, FDA review of emerging medical technologies, CMS policies on nursing home staffing mandates, and home health reimbursements cuts and payments to hospitals with large shares of Medicaid patients.” Those who care about healthcare, the environment, workers’ safety, SEC, labor restrictions, and fair markets should feel a chill as the Supreme Court reversed the historic precedent in the Chevron decision that federal agencies should get the benefit of the doubt when interpreting any vagueness or undefined terms in existing legislation. Today, the situation is flipped: pro-regulation forces are government agencies and anti-regulatory forces are the judiciary.  I have no confidence that the Supreme Court has my back when it comes to requisite regulation. Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.