Judicial Restraint Is So Ten Minutes Ago

When judges were liberal, the right called for judicial restraint. Now that judges are often conservative, the right wants to give them more freedom to kill regulations.

Ann Gorsuch Burford and Ronald Reagan.

Was Ann Gorsuch Burford President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, or was Ann Gorsuch Burford the mother of future Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch? In a sense, the Supreme Court is considering this question in today’s oral arguments about whether to overturn its 1984 Chevron decision, which deferred to Burford’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that federal agencies are the experts on such matters. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can can read it here. Gotta go now, because I’m listening to the arguments so I can write about them.