The decision by the court’s conservative majority hands a win to Corner Post, a North Dakota truck stop, in its quest to challenge a Federal Reserve regulation issued in 2011 that set a cap on debit card “swipe fees,” which are paid by stores that accept card payments.
The court ruled the statute of limitations under the act does not begin “until the plaintiff is injured by final agency action.”
The Biden administration contended the clock starts as soon as the agency in question issues its rule, a standard that would cut off many possible challenges.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson read her dissent aloud from the bench, a practice that emphasizes sharp disagreement on the issue at hand.
“Never mind that, in the administrative-law context, limitations statutes uniformly run from the moment of agency action. Never mind that a plaintiff ’s injury is utterly irrelevant to a facial APA claim. According to the Court, we must ignore all of this because, for other kinds of claims, accrual begins at the time of a plaintiff ’s injury,” Jackson said in her dissent.
The decision reversed a lower court decision to dismiss the complaint as outside the statute of limitations.
Corner Post argued the central bank set the cap higher than the “reasonable” limit directed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The truck stop didn’t open its doors until 2018 — seven years after the Fed’s regulation — and asserted it should still be able to file suit.
It marks another victory for anti-regulatory interests by dealing another blow to the growing size of the “administrative state.”
The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld and Taylor Giorno have more here.
