Biden’s Agenda Faces a Court System More Hostile to Agency Power

Late on the second day of Amy Coney Barrett’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings in October, after hours of questions about abortion and health care, Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho abruptly switched gears—to the minutiae of regulatory law. “The interpreter in our system should not be the agency that is enforcing the statute,” Crapo declared. “The courts should oversee this.”

Crapo was criticizing an arcane but highly influential legal precedent known as Chevron deference, or the Chevron doctrine—from the 1984 Supreme Court decision in Chevron v. NRDC—in which the justices give federal agencies the benefit ...