End Citizens United (ECU) President released the following statement on a new report from the Washington Post detailing how conservative billionaire megadonor Charles Koch and his dark money political network spent decades and millions of dollars to overturn Chevron deference:
“The overturning of Chevron was made possible by the disastrous Citizens United decision. Dismantling our campaign finance laws allowed Charles Koch and his billionaire friends to buy off politicians and stack the Supreme Court. Until we rein in the rigged and corrupt system of Big Money in politics, billionaires and corporate special interests will continue to chip away at critical protections for the American public.”
Washington Post: How billionaire Charles Koch’s network won a 40-year war to curb regulation
Justin Jouvenal, Jon Swaine and Ann E. Marimow
12/08/2024
Key Sections:
- The 2019 Seafood Expo North America in Boston featured an oyster-shucking contest, whole squid on ice and some surprising attendees: attorneys from the powerful political network of Charles Koch, a billionaire who has spent decades and millions fighting government regulation.
- They weren’t there for the seafood samples. They were fishing for fishermen, seeking stories of boat captains upset by federal regulations that would soon require herring fishermen to pay for onboard government monitors.
- The outreach demonstrated the unusually broad coordination by the Koch network to challenge a bedrock legal precedent that had touched many aspects of American life — from drugs and the environment to banking and workplace safety.
- That effort culminated in June when the Supreme Court struck down the principle known as Chevron deference, which for 40 years had required judges to give federal agencies significant latitude in implementing laws in areas where Congress did not give specific guidance.
- Other Supreme Court decisions last term garnered more attention, including on abortion pills and presidential immunity. But many legal experts say Chevron could be one of the most significant rulings of this generation because of its sweep.
- The legal precedent had been cited in more than 18,000 decisions over the past four decades. Its demise has unleashed a new flood of challenges to the regulatory power of federal agencies, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seized on it last month as a key tool in their quest to slash thousands of federal jobs and dismantle bureaucracy as part of the incoming Trump administration.
- This is the inside story of how a network of interconnected organizations — with common employees and funding from Koch and wealthy like-minded donors — spent years strategizing how to take down Chevron, ultimately finding the test case they needed to upend decades of precedent.
- The Washington Post interviewed dozens of lawyers and strategists involved in the Chevron case and others, reviewed hundreds of pages of tax records, traced millions in funding and reviewed a recording of Koch-aligned groups discussing the case in private.
- The reporting provides fresh detail about how the network supported the legal fight against Chevron. Koch-funded charities pumped nearly $18 million in recent years into the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) and Cause of Action, the public interest firms that brought the lawsuits.
Click here to read the full report.
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