Originally Published: January 17, 2024 4:55 p.m.

In Wednesday's oral arguments, the right-wing legal world reached an inflection point it had been working towards for decades. 

The 6-3 supermajority conservative Supreme Court got the chance to scrap Chevron deference, a pillar of agency power. Chevron deference is the principle that when laws are silent or ambiguous on the particulars of how they should be enacted, courts should let regulatory agencies and their experts fill in that gap, as long as their interpretation is reasonable.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose past writing formed the spine of the briefs for those fighting to hobble agency power, abandoned any pretense at neutrality Wednesday in even his earliest colloquies with the lawyers. 

"Who decides?" Gorsuch asked, interrupting the lawyer opposing the government to better make his argument for him. "Is the judge persuaded at the end of the day, with proper deference given to a co-equal branch of government, or does the judge abdicate that responsibility and say, automatically, whatever the agency says wins?" 

It's not hard to tell where Gorsuch comes down, as he twists agency deference into a heads big, scary government wins, tails judges are hamstrung and "ordinary citizens" lose proposition. 

Chevron has long been an obstacle to these right-wing forces' efforts to unspool and defang regulation, to create an even friendlier legal environment for business. Unwinding it has been the driving thrust of the movement, the source of its endless funding and resources.

Gorsuch, son of a mother who boasted about eliminating Environmental Protection Agency regulations while she was the agency's Reagan administration chief, is the perfect face for the nearly successful effort and served as its spokesperson during the oral arguments. With his abstract libertarianism, the justice maintained that Chevron means the government never loses — a surprise to those of us who have watched Biden agency actions from student debt forgiveness to power plant regulations fall at the hands of this Court. With Chevron in hand, Gorsuch waxed, the tyrannical government can run roughshod over Congress, judges and the "citizens" pitted against its might.

Flanked by his right-wing colleagues, many of whom were incubated in the same environments, Gorsuch is poised to lead the Court in overturning — or at least, fatally weakening — Chevron and fulfilling the promise for which they were chosen. 

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