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Former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon once vowed to "deconstruct the administrative state", and he may get his way thanks to the Supreme Court's far right majority. The SCOTUS cases Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce could have a huge impact on the power of federal agencies to make and enforce regulations.  Photo by Mr. Kjetil Ree .  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 The cases challenge a legal doctrine established in the 1984 Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council , which requires courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws, unless they are unreasonable. The so-called “ Chevron deference ” doctrine has enabled agencies to address complex administrative issues without having to wait for Congress to act. However, some conservative judges and critics of the Chevron deference claim that it gives too much power to unelected bureaucrats ...

Judge Brett Kavanaugh (by U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit via Wikimedia Commons) Republicans are once again playing dirty tricks. After they refused to confirm Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court Merrick Garland , they are now rushing through the confirmation of Trump's nominee Brett Kavanaugh .  On August 31 the White House asserted executive privilege in order to hide 100,000 pages of records on Kavanaugh from the time of the Bush administration. A nominee will be confirmed without proper public scrutiny. Most importantly, Kavanaugh has expressed views that would allow Donald Trump to openly obstruct justice and rule unchecked as if he were above the law.  “I believe that the president should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” Kavanaugh wrote  in a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review . “We should not burden a sitting president with civil suits, criminal in...

United States Supreme Court (by Jeff Kubina, via Wikimedia Commons) In August 1971, shortly before accepting Richard Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court,  Lewis Powell  wrote a confidential  memorandum  to the US Chamber of Commerce. In the document, Powell argued that the American system of free enterprise was under attack by leftist groups, and he envisioned a strategy to fight back against those forces that were, in his view, anti-business. "[B]usinessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it," Powell wrote. He praised business executives for having performed "very well indeed" the role "to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens." However, he argued th...