The Supreme Court ruled Friday to uphold a telecommunications fee that helps provide affordable phone and internet service to low-income and rural areas, rejecting arguments that Congress had handed off too much power to federal regulators.
The justices ruled 6-3 that the Federal Communications Commission had the authority to impose the fee, dashing conservatives’ hopes that the case would revive a long-dormant legal doctrine. The ruling largely allows federal agencies to retain their regulatory authority absent explicit instructions from Congress.
“We hold that no impermissible transfer of authority has occurred,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority. “Under our nondelegation precedents, Congress sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme.”
The decision rejects the argument raised by the right-leaning nonprofit Consumers’ Research that the funding mechanism for the FCC’s universal service fund violated the nondelegation doctrine — a legal theory that the court hasn’t invoked since 1935.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts have expressed interest in reviving the doctrine. But other justices raised concerns during oral arguments in March that scrapping the fee would hurt rural and low-income communities.
Gorsuch wrote a dissent, joined by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, arguing that the majority’s ruling “defies the Constitution’s command that Congress ‘may not transfer to another branch powers that are strictly and exclusively legislative.'”
Gorsuch wrote that even as the court “swallows a delegation beyond anything yet seen in the U.S. reports, it also signals, unmistakably, that there are some abdications of congressional authority, including in the very statute before us, that the present majority isn’t prepared to stomach.”
The FCCand the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition had brought the consolidated case to the Supreme Court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had invalidated the fee.
The cases were Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research and Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition v. Consumers’ Research.
