What the end of the Chevron deference means for regulatory power

For 40 years, federal judges deferred to the expertise of government agencies to interpret ambiguous language in laws. But after a recent Supreme Court decision, that power now lies in the hands of the judiciary.

David Doniger, senior advisor to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund.

Lisa Heinzerling, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in environmental and administrative law.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Congress writes the laws. The judiciary interprets the laws. The executive branch carries them out. That's a lesson I know you remember from Schoolhouse Rock. At least I do, and maybe I'm just dating myself by saying that. But all in all, it's pretty straightforward, right?

The problem is, the laws themselves are not that straightforward. Governing the country requires writing legislation around complex topics, such as environmental regulation, financial regulation, and in that case, sometimes for financial products that don't even exist yet. There's also technology.

Again, sometimes for tech that's already evolved several generations, before the ink on a president's signature has dried. That raises a critical question. As laws are enacted in the real world, ambiguous parts of those laws often have to be interpreted for practical implementation. Maybe something like, what exactly are the thresholds to define a chemical as toxic? For 40 years, federal judges deferred to the expertise of federal agencies to work out those ambiguities. That is until last month, when the United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, overturned that landmark, saying it's actually, quote, "The responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what an agency says," end quote.

Or, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it in his concurrence, the court is going back to those Schoolhouse Rock basics. Quote, "Today, the court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the nation's founding." End quote. If you're a regular listener by now, you know that we here at On Point truly love wonkery.

But this ruling is far more than that. It's also another transition from the philosophical to the concrete when it comes to the entire functioning of the federal government. And it will likely have major impacts on vast swaths of American life, even if those impacts are not immediately evident.

So today, let's get a deeper understanding of what Justice Gorsuch calls the quote, tombstone that the court placed on the so-called Chevron court. Joining us now is David Doniger. In 1984, he argued the original case that the court has now effectively overturned. And since then, he's also served as the associate director for global environment in the White House Office of Environmental Policy.

That was between '93 to '94. He was also Director of Climate Change Policy for the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation from 1994 to 2001. Today, he joins us in his role as a Senior Advisor to the NRDC Action Fund. David, welcome to On Point.

DAVID DONIGER: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: So that 1984 case that was the 40-year precedent essentially that the court just overturned.

That case was called Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. And back then, you were arguing on behalf of the NRDC. So here's what I understand.

DONIGER: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Here's what I understand about that case, that much of it revolved, speaking of ambiguities, right? Much of it revolved around the interpretation of just one word. What word was that?

DONIGER: The word was source. What is a source of air pollution?

CHAKRABARTI: Source. Yeah, so what was the dispute over that?

DONIGER: So all the requirements of the Clean Air Act to control pollution apply to stationary sources. Meaning industrial facilities, and Congress had written a law in our view so that all these requirements applied when a company built a new blast burner or boiler or big piece of equipment. Regardless whether it was built a site by itself or nested inside an industrial plant that already existed. And the Reagan administration rewrote the definition of a source in a way that excluded 90% of the industrial new projects from all these requirements. We went to the court, the lower court, and won a case, it was called NRDC v. Gorsuch, who happened to be the administrator of the EPA and the mother of the current Justice Gorsuch.

The government took the case up to the Supreme Court. The names change when you do that, and the Supreme Court said actually, this term has some ambiguity. It could be defined the way you say, NRDC. It could be defined the way the Reagan administration says, and that's a policy decision.

We're going to leave that to agencies to decide which one works best to clean the air.

CHAKRABARTI: David, hang in for a second because I just want to add a little bit more of like texture to what you're saying, because it's so fascinating. First of all, as you pointed out, I just want to emphasize that you're absolutely correct.

The head of the EPA during this period of the Reagan administration was Ann Gorsuch. Who actually happen[s] to be the first female administrator of the EPA. And as you said, her son is currently on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch. The second thing I just wanted to clarify a little bit more.

So in the original text of the '63 Clean Air Act, does Congress just throw in the word source of air pollution, or is there any context around the word?

DONIGER: Yeah, it was worse than that. First of all, it's the 1970 Clean Air Act.

CHAKRABARTI: '70, sorry.

DONIGER: That's all right. Congress defined the term source. It said a source is any building, structure, facility or installation that emits air pollution.

And the common meaning of that, so think of it as textualist, and what was the common meaning of those terms at the time? Everyone in Congress and everyone around the Congress thought that meant individual pieces of pollution emitting industrial operations, as I said, a boiler or a blast furnace, they didn't think that meant an entire industrial plant. And the impact of changing the definition from the individual unit to the entire plant was that you could avoid all the pollution control requirements. If when you built this new thing, you reduced pollution somewhere else in the plant, but just enough to keep things even. Things were supposed to get better, things were supposed to be well controlled at the new installations.

You're supposed to have the best pollution controls possible on those, and then you're supposed to make a reduction in the area's pollution. That made for progress, that made for a net improvement. The Reagan administration's change to the definition exempted, as I said, 90% of the big industrial projects that otherwise would have met, would have had to meet these requirements.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So to be clear here, basically the NRDC at the time was objecting to a change made at the EPA, made at the agency itself. By the agency. Okay. So it was the agency's expertise and therefore how it interpreted this ambiguous deployment of the word source that the NRDC objected to, and then took a case all the way to the Supreme Court.

DONIGER: The government having lost below, the Reagan administration took the case to the Supreme Court.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Details matter. I appreciate that.

DONIGER: The point is that at the time in 1984, the Supreme Court was getting, was sending a message to the lower courts, which is stay out of policy, leave policy decisions to Congress and the executive branch agencies. Because the Congress obviously is elected every two years. And the federal agencies report to the president, who's up for election every four years.

So they're responsive to the voters. Policy should be decided by the political branches, not by the unelected judges. That's what the Supreme Court said in 1984.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And, but again, the reason why I'm so thrilled that you could join us today is because it's ironic that you have some very clear opinions of what the court just ruled last month. Because back in the Chevron case in 1984, effectively since you were arguing on behalf of NRDC, the court ruled against you at that time.

DONIGER: That's right. I'd like to say my career would be bookended by the birth and death of the Chevron doctrine, and I'll be on the losing side both times. What happened here is that there's always a role for judges if the government, if the administrative agencies try to misbehave and misinterpret a clear statute. We need the courts to be able to step in and say, you got it wrong, but when there is this ambiguity that you described, because Congress can't, doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with everything.

It doesn't have the foresight. It doesn't have the expertise to write laws that are as detailed as the regulations have to be. So they ask agencies to help in this task. And when you have a genuine question that has been delegated to an agency, then it is right that the agency has some policy discretion.

And this is what irritated the conservative legal movement after a while, because while this first decision was from the Reagan administration, and it weakened the Clean Air Regulations, during the Clinton administration and the Obama administration, it was possible to use the same neutral doctrine to do more with the environmental laws, to interpret the ambiguity in favor of greater protection, not less.

And the Conservatives, especially the big businesses and the billionaires who want the government out of their hair, they don't want government restricting their pollution or their financial activities and they want to be left alone to do what they think is best. They decided the real goal here is to make government weaker and take away this authority from federal agencies to interpret the laws to meet policy needs.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

DONIGER: Instead to put that in the hands of judges.

CHAKRABARTI: We're just headed towards a break here, David, but this is so interesting to me. That all of this and the subsequent 40 years of deference essentially, right?

Because it's called the Chevron deference, that the federal judiciary practice deference to agency expertise all came from the arguments over that one word, source, in the 1970 version of the Clean Air Act. So you know, when texts of legislation these days are thousands of pages long, there are millions of potential words to have very, deeply impactful arguments over.

So when we come back, David, I'm going to want to explore, okay, first of all, what are the judicial philosophies on either side of this case, and what impact is it going to have on our everyday life? So we've got a lot to talk about in just a minute. This is On Point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: David, stand by here for just a minute because I want to bring Lisa Heinzerling into the conversation. She's a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. She specializes in environmental and administrative law, also former senior climate policy counsel to the administrator of the EPA.

Professor Heinzerling, welcome to On Point.

LISA HEINZERLING: Thank you. Great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, great to have you. So the case specifically that the court just decided on last month is called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. Can you just give us a quick summary of what that case was about and how it became essentially an edict or like a transformative case regarding the Chevron deference?

HEINZERLING: This is a case involving fisheries management of all things, it involves a rule that an agency set that would require commercial fishers to pay for people who come on board the ships and monitor whether the fishers are complying with requirements for fisheries management. But the case wasn't about any of that.

The Supreme Court only accepted one of the two questions that the parties presented. And that question was, should we overrule Chevron? And didn't accept the question of what exactly the fisheries management statute meant and didn't answer anything about it. So the fishers in the case were really beside the point.

The court was after Chevron.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. Was this one of those cases, and we've seen this both from the right and the left in any number of cases that make it to the court, that was essentially designed for that purpose? Oh, I think so. There was no, as I say, these were fairly nominal plaintiffs.

The rule wasn't even an effect or being a enforced at the time the court decided the case, it had been in effect for one year and a grand total of something like $21,000 had been spent by fishers, not even these fishers and it had all been reimbursed. So it wasn't really a live case. It was about a quite tiny and not in effect rule.

And yet the justices made a great deal at argument about the fact that it involved businesspeople and these noble fishermen, and it didn't really involve them. It involved the major stake, the one that probably led billionaires to fund the lawyers for the plaintiffs. That they were after Chevron.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so a little bit more legal background here to help us understand the implications of this ruling.

From what I understand and, specifically Chief Justice John Roberts wrote about this in the majority opinion, that what the issue that the court had, the court's majority had, was over the Chevron deference's inconsistency, as they saw it, with the Administrative Procedure Act.

Can you explain that, Professor Heinzerling?

HEINZERLING: Absolutely. The Administrative Procedure Act is basically the most important law you've never heard of. It's a 1946 statute that governs the work of administrative agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission and so forth. That tells them how to set their rules, what kinds of stuff they need to do in setting rules, and it tells Courts how to review agencies' work. And so the court said, we found in one provision of that statute that had never been understood this way. It said that this one provision starts out by saying that courts shall review, shall decide all questions of law in a case involving a challenge to an agency decision.

And they said that means that you can't defer, because courts are deciding that. And so it really undid the previous understanding of the statute, that statute had never been understood that way, and it wasn't in fact until the administration of President Barack Obama who was very active in setting his policy agenda by using agencies work. It wasn't until then that people really discovered that provision and said, Oh this makes Chevron actually illegal and that's what the court held.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So David, let me turn back to you. Because I'd love your interpretations on this. And I'm just looking right now at the majority opinion from Chief Justice Roberts. And as Professor Heinzerling is saying, Roberts basically says that Administrative Procedure Act, in the majority's interpretation, directs the courts to decide legal questions by applying their own judgment.

And they further say that it makes it clear that agency interpretation of statutes. And he goes on to add, like agency interpretations of the Constitution, are not entitled to deference, and it remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether a law means what the agency says. On first reading, if we're doing a strict reading of what the Administrative Procedure Act says, that seems to be a reasonable conclusion, David.

DONIGER: Suppose the Congress, when it writes a law, says, We want the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator to make a judgment about what is the reasonable level of pollution or whether a technology is adequately demonstrated. Terms like that convey to the agency some discretion to make a judgment.

In fact, part of this opinion says, if that's what the law says the agency gets to decide something, then that's the law, that's the correct reading of the law. So there is still a space within this new decision for judges to determine that Congress has actually given a question to the agency to decide.

And then it's the judge's role is more limited. Did the agency, when it did its technical homework, its scientific homework, does it stand up to scrutiny? Or is it so wacky that it meets a much more deferential test called arbitrary and capricious? So even in destroying Chevron, there is a path in this new decision.

For something that's very much the same, in other words, the judge has to decide whether Congress delegated to the agency some space to make a policy decision. And if so, the judge is supposed to respect that decision. If it's not wacko. If it's not arbitrary and capricious. You might say that the Chevron deference doctrine got a new name.

Of Loper Bright delegation, Loper Bright's the name of the case, and this concept is to Congress delegate. Now, the problem is, everybody understood how the Chevron Doctrine worked. It had been applied literally 18,000 times in lower court decisions.

CHAKRABARTI: One of the most cited cases, right? One of the most cited cases ever.

DONIGER: Yeah, and lower court judges know a lot about how to apply the test. They've scrambled everything by overturning it. They have, in my view, resurrected the doctrine in different words. Inside the new decision, it's not completely the same, but it's very much the same. Question is whether judges around the country are going to understand it and apply it consistently. Let me just make an analogy to what's happened since the court overturned Roe v. Wade and what's happened since the court radically changed the way gun regulation works. The court may have thought that they were establishing a clear new approach. But the lower courts are utterly confused, and you've ended up with all kinds of decisions that are all over the country that some of which are quite alarming.

For example, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is in New Orleans, gave this domestic abuser who was shooting his gun off in public the protection of the Second Amendment, in the wake of the gun decisions that the court issued a couple of years ago. So this year, the court had to take the case of this domestic abuser.

Could his gun rights be constrained? And they said, we didn't mean to prohibit that. That's obviously allowed. The point I'm making is they've unleashed chaos and it may be on purpose. And we're going to have judges all over the country interpreting the new Loper Bright decision and the rules after Chevron quite differently.

That's what where I noted that law firms in Washington are busy advertising to their clients, Hey, if you have an old regulation, you would like to undo, come to us. Don't go to our competitors. We're the best ones to attack it for you.

CHAKRABARTI: It's always the lawyers that see the dollar signs, David, but your point is well taken.

I really, I'm glad you raised it. I can see it a couple of ways though. One is that in order for these regulations or the interpretation of the regulations to be challenged, it has to go through the court. And if there are any regulations that people don't challenge, they will continue on under the purview of the expertise of the agency that did that interpretation.

But on the other hand, I think the thing that really makes people have this sense of, huh, this doesn't make common sense, and that is over the issue of expertise, right? And so Professor Heinzerling, let me turn back to you on this. Because, obviously the majority knew very well that people would be asking a lot of questions about this.

And Chief Justice John Roberts, he said in the majority decision, he emphasizes, in fact, that, quote, Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions. I just want you to interpret for me the use of the word statutory in there, because I think it means something different than if he just said, technical questions.

HEINZERLING: So I think he's saying that when a statute or just a law passed by Congress, same thing, when it deals with a very technical matter, it deals with air pollution, how much air pollution should there be?

How can we determine that drugs are safe? Are planes safe to fly and how can we make them safer? All those kinds of questions involve technical expertise, often they involve very many different scientific disciplines, and therefore a lot dealing with them itself is going to trade in kind of specialized terms and specialized concept.

And so what he's saying is Congress often will call on courts to deal with those subjects. Sure. Yes, sometimes it does. And sometimes it does that in terms of giving courts power to decide cases themselves, right? It doesn't go through an administrative agency. By far and away, the greater reality is that Congress uses agencies.

And those agencies are given statutes to implement. And so what he's saying is, yes, Congress does that. Yes, but it matters. It matters whether Congress has chosen to say that this goes through an agency to establish more specialized rules to deal with this subject matter. Then when the Congress, again, not that commonly dispenses with.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just jump in here because let's make this real for folks. So essentially what the court is saying is that Congress expects, as you say, the courts to make decisions on these technical disputes over various statutes. And also, they go so far as to say, it doesn't matter if the justices don't have a PhD in chemistry or nuclear physics, right?

Because they have the benefit of the briefings from parties and friend of the court briefings that would provide them with adequate expertise to make these decisions. But, again, to make it concrete, can we just use a recent example? Because I know the process by which PFAS chemicals are the supposed forever, also known as forever chemicals, they recently, the EPA made some decisions around those.

Can we use that as an example, Lisa?

HEINZERLING: Absolutely. There's a statute. We think of it as the Superfund law. It governs the cleanup of hazardous waste sites in this country. It started with Love Canal. Some people go back that far and in remembering the days when we just dumped toxics wherever and didn't require anyone to clean them up.

Superfund law changed that. And that law gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to designate certain substances or chemicals as hazardous under the statute. And that brings with it, once the EPA does that, it brings with it not only cleanup authorities, but also requirements to report releases, requirements for the federal government on its property and so forth. So it bumps up the requirements under Superfund. And so EPA declared two of those PFAS chemicals or forever chemicals, as you say, to be hazardous substances. And in fact, that rule just became effective this very week.

And when it did that, it followed a statutory instruction from Congress to say, you can label substances as hazardous if they present a substantial danger, are the words used, to the public health or the environment. And the EPA looked at years and years of studies, both in labs on laboratory animals and in human populations and found that these chemicals do indeed present a substantial danger.

They last forever, as the name suggests. They cause a variety of illnesses, including cancer, damage to the liver, damage to the heart, and so forth. They're found all over the place. And the agency took all those factors and said, this is a substantial danger. And under Chevron, it would feel like that was one of those decisions that Chevron was made for.

You have an expert agency taking in a lot of evidence, dealing with a broad term and saying, yeah, our judgment is that this is what Congress had in mind when they gave us this authority, and we're going to take action on these chemicals. But now, and I disagree somewhat with David about the actual meaning of the Loper Bright case, But I think on this point, it's everyone would agree that the Loper Bright case says, what the test now is, what do judges think?

What do judges think? And they may well have a different view about substantial danger. Maybe they're not worried about environmental problems. And so that's the difference.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just play for both of you the argument as made by a key supporter of the overturning of Chevron, and this argument comes from the New Civil Liberties Alliance. It's a law firm, which was one of the lead entities affiliated with overturning Chevron. It happens to be a firm that receives considerable financial support from Charles Koch and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society.

So here's senior litigation counsel, John Vecchione, again of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, talking about the concern about Chevron on the podcast, The World and Everything In It.

JOHN VECCHIONE: We want to get rid of this idea that if Congress doesn't say anything, suddenly the agency has power if it wants it.

That can't be right. So we either want Chevron to be removed because it's a judicially created doctrine. Congress didn't say that. In fact, we think the Administrative Procedure Act says the exact opposite. I think that most people think the agencies are doing what Congress said to do in the statute.

And under Chevron, that's not true. If Congress is silent, then the agencies seem to be able to get away with anything they want to get away with. Many times, the agencies are not following what I think most lay people would call the law.

CHAKRABARTI: David Doniger, let me add a little bit to that. Because, again, we keep coming back to this fundamental disagreement about what is legal versus what is political.

What is policy versus what is politics. And, again, I keep going back to Justice Gorsuch's concurrence, because I actually think it has even more insightful language that helps us understand what the justices were thinking of, because he says basically all this ruling did, does is return the court to one of its original jobs, right?

Exactly as the court had done, quote, since the founding, resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government's favor. So when you talked about neutrality before, Gorsuch is saying, the agencies can't be neutral because they are agencies that are run by, under the auspices of the sitting president.

But it's the judiciary that is neutral, because it's tasked with neutrally interpreting the law.

DONIGER: I'd like to point out something else Justice Gorsuch has been saying. He's been saying it should be hard for Congress to pass laws and hard for agencies to issue regulations because those impinge on the liberty of the people who have been regulated.

Let's think about why these laws exist. The Clean Air Act exists because polluters exercising their liberty were putting, are putting, millions of tons of dangerous air pollutants into the air and threatening the health of the millions of people in this country, and in the case of climate change, the billions of people on this earth.

So it's the liberty interest of the people who are being harmed that Congress is trying to protect by passing a law like the Clean Air Act or the Superfund, which Lisa mentioned a few minutes ago. There's two liberty interests at stake. The liberty interest of the polluter and that of the people who are polluted.

And Justice Gorsuch is paying attention only to the former. Same is true in financial fraud. The financial fraudster has a liberty interest, but so does the victim of the fraud. And these laws are attempting to give some protections to the people who are hurt by unrestricted activity, by the big corporations and the rich people in this country.

They don't need the protections. It's the ordinary people who need the protections. And it would be nice if Justice Gorsuch gave equal weight to the interests of the people who are supposed to be protected.

CHAKRABARTI: But to be fair, David, and forgive me for pushing you on this, is your argument now, but back in 1984 you felt that basically the EPA was abusing its power in making these decisions on behalf of what the EPA then saw as the interests of the people.

DONIGER: Because sometimes the Congress, often, but not always, the Congress is clear. Congress can't be clear in these hyper technical areas all the time. It doesn't have the bandwidth and the expertise and the foresight to see everything that was coming up. Here's another example. In 1970, Congress said that an air pollutant is any substance, any chemical substance thrust into the atmosphere by industrial activity, and in other words, any chemical pollutant.

In the 1980s, the Bush administration denied that under the EPA, denied that carbon dioxide and the other climate changing pollutants were air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and Lisa wrote the brief for states and environmental organizations that got the Supreme Court to say, look, this is a place where Congress has been clear. And in that case, the law clearly and unambiguously covers carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases.

That's why the EPA has the authority to regulate climate changing pollution. There actually have been three other decisions by the Supreme Court that accept that premise. So EPA has got the authority clearly to regulate climate changing pollution. And if a court said, no, they would just be flatly wrong on that. Now the question is how can you regulate that pollution? And the court has been nickeling and diming EPA's authority, but the authority is there. And Congress, when it is clear, the judges have to respect what Congress has said. It's just that you can't possibly be clear in all the details in areas that are so numerous and so complicated.

There are 430 agencies. If Congress was going to deal with one a day in refreshing their laws or reviewing what they were doing, they still couldn't get to them, to all the subject matters. Because the world is throwing so many problems at us. We need a modern government that can respond to those problems.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can you hold on to that thought? Because that is, that's what I want to have our conversation land in about the present and the future, because this is the thing that I just cannot sort through in my mind. We can't seem to make decisions as a federal government that actually help us modernize, as you said, governance in order to meet the needs or the challenges of the 21st century. But I'm going to come back to that in a second, because there is another brief area that I want to explore, Professor Heinzerling, and that is, as I said earlier, this is more than just one ruling, right? This is another concrete change in how the federal government operates that stems from, quite frankly, the conservative majority is very open enmity against the so called administrative state, right?

And I think I've read a lot of legal analysts who call Justice Gorsuch as the leading quote-unquote revolutionary in reforming administrative law. I think it was in a 2019 case, the Gundy case, where he just flat out denounced the rise of the administrative state. ever since the New Deal.

So is that part of the sort of undoing of the power of not the executive, per se, but again, agency power, that the conservative majority in the court has been acting on for quite some time?

HEINZERLING: Yes, in all domains and structure of agencies, in their statutory authority, in the way they need to explain themselves.

And as you point out in the case called Gundy, and here is something that the Supreme Court hasn't even gotten to yet. So it has been dismantling agencies, changing their structures, changing interpretation, all of that. But one of the things it hasn't gotten to, is it going to revive something called the non-delegation doctrine, which is the idea that Congress can't give its legislative power to any other entity, including to administrative agencies.

Five justices, actually, even though the Gundy case didn't take this step, but five justices have either written or joined opinion saying they are prepared to really deploy the non-delegation doctrine to strike down federal statutes, and what that would mean is that if the statute didn't say enough about exactly how an agency was to do its work, it could be struck down by the supreme court is unconstitutional. This is the big one really, as far as all these issues goes, because it would cut across agencies and statutes. And so, and to pair them together, the Loper Bright decision that we've been talking about was all about what's the approach to statutory interpretation, and was really grounding that approach in a specific statute, the Administrative Procedure Act, and saying that makes courts in charge of interpretation. But the non-delegation principle would be able to undo statutes rather than simply to read them narrowly.

And so it's quite a threat. And as I say, five justices have at one time written or signed opinions saying that they will vote to revise it.