A decades-old Supreme Court precedent seen by critics as giving too much power to federal agencies was highly scrutinized on Wednesday by members of the high court’s Republican-appointed majority.

Arguments in two separate hearings on Wednesday surrounded appeals filed by two fishing companies of lower court rulings that allowed the National Marine Fisheries Service to force commercial fishermen to help pay for “at-sea” human monitors to be on board their vessels and keep track of the number of herring fish caught. The companies argue that Congress never authorized the agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, to establish the program.

The majority of the nine justices, six of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, appeared critical of the 40-year-old precedent known as the 1984 Chevron doctrine, which states that if a federal rule is challenged in court, the court should defer to the agency and its “reasonable” interpretation of the congressional statute it says grants them permission to create the rule.

At least one conservative justice appeared skeptical of completely overruling the doctrine. All three Democratic-appointed justices appeared certain about preserving the doctrine’s deference to the expertise of agencies if a statute is written ambiguously.

The Supreme Court could also take an alternative approach that would place additional limits on when lower court judges can defer to agencies without necessarily overturning Chevron.

One of the most staunch skeptics of Chevron on display Wednesday was Justice Neil Gorsuch, a former President Donald Trump appointee, who mentioned that the doctrine created confusion in lower courts and said it had even prompted circuit judges to write letters asking the high court to overturn the precedent.

“Even in a case involving herring fishermen, and the question of whether they have to pay for government officials to be on board their boats … lower court judges, even here in this rather prosaic case, can’t figure out what Chevron means,” Gorsuch told Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another appointee of Trump, highlighted how Chevron is often a catalyst for instability by allowing new presidential administrations to define laws in different ways than previous administrations.

Notably, the Supreme Court has already been distancing itself from Chevron for the past eight years, some of the justices pointed out during the first hearing. Rather than using Chevron, the court has instead moved toward the so-called major questions doctrine, which states that Congress must be direct in authorizing actions with cascading impacts on politics and the economy.

Chief Justice John Roberts focused on the high court’s lack of reliance on Chevron, wondering whether it had been overruled in practice.

Arguing on behalf of the Justice Department, which opposes overriding Chevron, Prelogar said the high court could affirm that lower court judges should run through other tools of interpretation before deciding if a statute is ambiguous.

Gorsuch sparred on several occasions with Prelogar, questioning at one point if the standard for determining ambiguity is in itself too subjective.

“What if ambiguity is ambiguous?” Gorsuch asked.

Overruling Chevron, Prelogar told the justices in defense of the doctrine, would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.”

Kavanaugh countered that “the reality of how this works is Chevron itself has shocks to the system when a new administration comes in.”

The doctrine derives from the 1984 decision, which at the time was considered a win for the deregulatory efforts of the Reagan administration, in a dispute known as Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been cited tens of thousands of times in subsequent court cases.

Both cases on Tuesday were brought on behalf of groups of fishermen, one in New Jersey and the other in Rhode Island.

In the case from the New Jersey fishermen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a challenge to a 2020 regulation adopted by NMFS that required the fishermen to not only transport the observers but also pay their salary, which amounts to roughly $700 per day, sometimes more than what the fishermen earn individually.

The D.C. Circuit rejected the challenge from the New Jersey plaintiffs, citing Chevron. A unanimous three-judge panel on the 1st Circuit ruled similarly.

“Congress can hardly see a week in the future with respect to the subject, let alone a year or a decade in the future,” Kagan said. “Congress knows that this court and lower courts are not competent with respect to deciding all the questions about AI that are going to come up in the future.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, another justice who defended Chevron, raised concerns about the judiciary becoming an “uber legislator” if the 1984 doctrine was overruled. She recused from the case surrounding the New Jersey fishermen, known as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, due to her previous role hearing the case at the D.C. Circuit. The high court later agreed to hear the nearly identical case from Rhode Island, Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce.

Jackson worried about if overturning Chevron would force agencies to go to court each time they adopt a new rule to seek a declaratory judgment before going forward with their policies.

“No,” said Roman Martinez, an attorney for the Rhode Island group.

“I think what the agency has to do is what everyone else has to do, which is try to figure out what the law means and act accordingly. And if someone challenges that,” it will be sorted out in court, Martinez said.

Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the most difficult of the conservative justices to read as far as which way she was leaning, and she asked pointed questions on both sides of the debate.

Thomas Berry, a research fellow for the Cato Institute, said after oral arguments that it “appears likely” the court has found a route toward overturning Chevron entirely.

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“As counsel for both Loper Bright and Relentless pointed out, that task can include giving proper respect to longstanding and contemporaneous interpretations of the Executive Branch. But as Justice Kavanaugh rightly clarified, finding Executive arguments persuasive is much different than deferring to those arguments even when a judge is not persuaded,” Berry said.

The fate of Chevron will be decided before the end of June, although the high court often saves some of its most complex decisions for last.