Jeff Childers

Courtwatch Alert! The New York Post ran a tantalizing story Sunday headlined, “Supreme Court poised to end ‘constitutional revolution’ that’s marred US governance for 40 years.” We can hope. Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear what might be the most important case in our generation related to paring back out-of-control government and draining the swamp.

It started when two New England fisheries sued the federal government a couple years ago after the feds forbade herring boats — usually as small as five crew — from going out fishing unless a nanny-like federal monitor went out fishing with them, to watch them every second. Adding insult to injury, Biden’s Fisheries agency also made the boat owners pay the monitor’s salary — an amount often exceeding the entire day’s profits.

Why? Because science, of course. So shut up.

The lawsuits challenged a 1984 Supreme Court precedent called “Chevron deference,” a judicially-excreted doctrine that fell out of the similarly-named case of Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. To give you an idea of how judicially-activist it was, respected legal scholar Gary Lawson called the decision “nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.” President Reagan’s lawyer called the case “the single most important reason the administrative state has continued to grow out of control.”

The doctrine itself gets a little wonky, which is one reason nobody’s heard of it, but essentially “Chevron deference” gives broad ‘rulemaking’ authority to thousands of executive agencies under the White House’s control, agencies like the CDC and the EPA. Many originalist legal scholars think the doctrine violates the Constitutional separation of powers, because there isn’t much difference between ‘rule making’ and lawmaking, which is reserved to Congress.

Put another way, the Chevron deference decision was the administrative state’s Roe v. Wade. Since the ‘administrative state’ is a synonym for the ‘deep state,’ the case threatens to drop napalm all over the deep state’s impenetrable bureaucratic jungle. If you want something to pray for, pray for the Supreme Court to take a bulldozer to the Chevron doctrine and not just a weed-whacker.