How do we avoid the judiciary becoming suddenly a super legislator, just telling the Congress

agency by agency whether it's a thumbs up or thumbs down from our perspective?

Hi and welcome back to Amicus.

This is Slates podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law and the U.S. Supreme

Court.

I'm Dialiswick.

I cover these things for Slate and this past Monday, the 2023 term opened.

Under a kind of weird blur of ethics violations, a very rare Clarence Thomas recusal, and a promise

that as the conservative supermajority works through its remaining to-do items, taking

a wrecking ball to the administrative state is absolutely top of the list this year.

As somebody pointed out to me earlier this week, protecting the orderly functioning of

the administrative state doesn't really sound like a super sexy project when you have

Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gates jello wrestling in the house and looming threats to shut down

the whole government.

But the fact is that the regulatory agencies that comprise 21st century government are

in fact the reason that we have clean water and have polio vaccines and it's also the

way predatory lenders are successfully regulated.

As Alana Kagan put it in her dissent, in the EPA Clean Air Act case from two short years

ago, the oligarch's effort to end government agencies is always a shell game.

Quote.

Today, one of those broader goals makes itself clear.

Government agencies from doing important work, even though that is what Congress directed,

...