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Notes -
The courts don't need any kind of deference doctrine to uphold the agency policy; they can always just find the agency's rationale persuasive enough to issue an opinion in accordance with it. All the various deference doctrines do is allow the courts to dodge the substance of the complaint. On the other hand, if the court wants to offer a differing interpretation, they're free to do so. This case may ultimately prove to by a pyrrhic victory for the petitioners, since all the court really did was kick it back to the First and DC Circuits rather than decide the issue themselves. I doubt many courts really want to get into the weeds over these kinds of questions.
Skidmore deference literally is in part about the persuasiveness of the reasoning (though it also looks at other factors like the history of the agency’s interpretation). That is, Skidmore is between Chevron and no deference.
And yes, the petitioners may lose! I don’t really care about these petitioners. I care about admin law and it got better! The outcome of this particular case is basically irrelevant.
Finally, the entire purpose of the court system is to “get into the weeds.” Indeed, the courts were supposed to have to do that even in Chevron to determine if there was in fact ambiguity and whether the agency’s interpretation was within that realm of ambiguity. Now practically we’re courts always doing their job? Maybe not. But that seems like a bad excuse to allow the executive to say what the law is. Doing so is inconsistent with (1) how Admin Law was conceived (IIRC Pound wrote about this in the early 20th century), (2) the APA, and (3) separation of powers.
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