Wealthy business entities and conservative advocates have been building toward this Supreme Court moment for decades. And now with three appointees of former President Donald Trump on the bench, their goal appears within reach, and the regulatory world could be turned on its head.
Justices who’ve been gradually constraining federal regulators sounded ready during arguments on Wednesday to make their most substantial move yet and gut a 1984 ruling that has given US agencies wide latitude over policy, from environmental protection to workplace safety.
Reversal of the so-called Chevron deference approach was a priority for the judicial selection team that served Trump – on par with some right-wing activists’ quest for reversal of constitutional abortion rights. The reconstituted Supreme Court delivered on that agenda item in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade.
Former White House counsel Don McGahn, who controlled Trump’s judicial selections, regularly touted the administration’s anti-regulation agenda. He was especially drawn to the first two Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, for their records in that regard.
“There’s a coherent plan here, where actually the judicial selection and the deregulatory effort are really the flip side of the same coin,” McGahn said at a 2018 appearance.
McGahn also remarked publicly of Gorsuch’s personal history. The Chevron case traces to the early 1980s tenure of Anne Gorsuch, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who cut back on air and water quality initiatives in the Reagan era of deregulation.
“Unlike Justice Gorsuch, my mother was not the head of the EPA,” he told a law school audience in 2020, but added, “I’ve always had an aversion to concentrated power.”
The Trump administration’s disdain for the so-called…
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