Supreme court allows swipe-fee lawsuit in blow to regulators

The US Supreme Court dealt a fresh blow to the authority of federal agencies, ruling in a case over debit-card swipe fees that some regulations can be challenged a decade or more after they were enacted.

Voting 6-3 along ideological lines, the justices said a North Dakota convenience store and truck stop can sue over a 2011 rule governing the charges that banks impose on merchants. The majority said a six-year statute of limitations doesn’t bar the suit because the business didn’t open until 2018.

The ruling could have ramifications across the US government, making a raft of longstanding rules newly vulnerable to challenge in court under the federal Administrative Procedure Act. The swipe-fee lawsuit will go forward even though merchant trade groups lost a similar case they filed soon after the Federal Reserve adopted the rule.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the nation’s highest court had to decide when a claim brought under the APA “accrues,” beginning the statute-of-limitations countdown.

It’s ‘straightforward’

“The answer is straightforward,” Barrett wrote. “A claim accrues when the plaintiff has the right to assert it in court — and in the case of the APA, that is when the plaintiff is injured by final agency action.”

The decision is likely to amplify the effect of a blockbuster ruling issued last week, when the justices overturned a 1984 precedent that had required judges to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an unclear statute. Last week’s ruling gave judges more of a mandate to toss out regulations as being inconsistent with Congress’ instructions.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the two decisions, taken together, meant that “any new objection to any old rule must be entertained and determined de novo by judges who can now apply their own unfettered judgment as to whether the rule should be voided.”

“At the end of a momentous term, this much is clear,” she wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the federal government.”

Up to Congress

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