The Supreme Court came down with another decision last week that is going to further hobble administrative agencies like the FCC. The case is McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., No. 23-1226.

This case started in 2013 as a class action lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California. The dispute between the parties began when McKesson Corporation sent unsolicited advertisements by fax to class members of the suit, including McLaughlin Chiropractic. The advertisements were sent to traditional fax machines as well as to online fax services.

The plaintiffs claimed that the unsolicited faxes were in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) which forbids unsolicited communications with consumers without giving them a chance to opt out of the communications. The alleged damages come from recipients spending money on paper and toner to print the unsolicited faxes, which the TCPA refers to as advertiser cost-shifting.

While the case was pending in California courts for six years, the FCC issued an order that excluded online fax services from the TCPA since online faxes receive electronic files and don’t print hard copies of a received fax.

The McLaughlin case made it to the Supreme Court because the District Court found that it was required to follow the new FCC order, even though it disagreed with the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA. The District Court also felt constrained by 1950 legislation referred to as the Hobbs Act, which has been interpreted as barring district courts from disagreeing with a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.

The recent Supreme Court ruling sided with the District Court by a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court ruled that “The Hobbs Act does not preclude district courts from independently assessing whether an agency’s interpretation of the relevant statute is correct.”

This is a significant ruling because it gives more explicit power to District Courts to disagree with an administrative ruling of a federal agency. It’s likely that there is a District Court somewhere in the country that will disagree with almost any federal agency ruling, meaning that it will be that much easier to tie up every decision made by the FCC or other federal agency in court.

When you tack this ruling onto the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for federal agencies to issue decision that will stick. The Loper Bright ruling overturned a long-standing deferential approach to agencies’ interpretations of statutes, making it easier to sue them.

This new ruling also has practical implications since it explicitly weakens FCC enforcement of the TCPA. Among other things, the TCPA rules are the FCC’s primary tool for its effort to restrain the use of autodialers and artificial voices used in spam messages to consumers.