Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went against his colleagues about taking up a case that challenged the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal by Allstates Refractory Contractors after a lower court threw out the Ohio company's lawsuit against OSHA.

The lawsuit argued that a 1970 federal law that gave OSHA the sweeping authority to issue workplace safety standards violates Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives lawmaking powers to Congress, and no other branch of the federal government.

Seven justices declined to hear the appeal. Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch, a fellow conservative, indicated they would have heard it.

While Gorsuch did not explain his reasoning, Thomas did so in an opinion dissenting from the decision to deny taking up the case.

"The question whether the Occupational Health and Safety Administration's broad authority is consistent with our constitutional structure is undeniably important," he wrote.

"At least five Justices have already expressed an interest in reconsidering this Court's approach to Congress's delegations of legislative power."

The petition is "an excellent vehicle to do exactly that," he wrote.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act "may be the broadest delegation of power to an administrative agency found in the United States Code," Thomas wrote. "If this far-reaching grant of authority does not impermissibly confer legislative power on an agency, it is hard to imagine what would."

It would be "no less objectionable," he argued, if Congress "gave the Internal Revenue Service authority to impose any tax on a particular person that it deems 'appropriate.'"

It is far from the first time that Thomas has gone against his fellow justices.

Last month, he was the only justice to dissent in a landmark gun rights case. The justices ruled 8-1 to uphold a federal gun control law intended to protect victims of domestic violence.

This week, he also called out his colleagues for what he said were "unnecessary" comments after the court unanimously declined to settle constitutional questions raised by social media laws in Texas and Florida. In a concurring opinion, Thomas said he agreed with the decision to return the cases to lower courts, but that he disagreed "with the court's decision to opine on certain applications of those statutes."

His dissenting opinion on Tuesday comes after the court's conservative majority on Friday dealt a major blow to federal regulatory power by overturning the court's1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that had instructed judges to defer to government agencies in interpreting laws where the law is ambiguous.