WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a split decision from the Sixth Circuit that upheld the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) authority to set workplace safety standards as constitutional. The lower federal appellate court had declined to rehear the case in December.
The justices on Monday denied a petition for a writ of certiorari filed in January by Allstates Refractory Contractors LLC. The company had argued in its petition that by empowering OSHA to regulate workplace safety standards to the extent that it does, Congress unconstitutionally delegated too much of its own power, as U.S. Circuit Judge John B. Nalbandian had said in his dissenting opinion from August.
“This delegation is as unconstitutional as it is unparalleled among modern agencies,” Allstates Refractory said in its petition. “And it was adopted precisely so Congress could avoid making the ‘hard choices’ innate to balancing worker safety with industry costs — the sort of legislative choices the Constitution requires Congress to make.”
