It's Thursday, January 18, 2024.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

It may be that yesterday's oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court

will turn out to be some of the most important in recent decades,

because the Supreme Court's conservative majority yesterday, at over three hours of open hearings

in terms of oral arguments, appeared to be ready at least to consider discarding one of the most important if damaging

precedence set by the Supreme Court over the course of the last century. That would take

us back to 1984 in a case known as Chevron versus the National Resources Defense Council.

In that case the Supreme Court of the United States

developed a new doctrine and that doctrine became known as deference

because of the name of the case it became known as Chevron deference.

The Supreme Court 1984 said that if the law is ambiguous in any respect a federal agency has the right to be presumed competent

and acting authoritatively if it acts reasonably upon the law now this became a

major engine for the development indeed the

explosion of what we would call popularly the federal bureaucracy but more

specifically it is the growth of the administrative state and this

leads to some of the biggest issues of worldview consideration and we're going to

go deep into those issues today again more than three hours of oral arguments.

And this has been building for a number of decades.

Almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed down that precedent in 1984,

conservatives understood that our very constitutional system of government is at risk.

We have federal administrative agencies, sometimes with what amounts to police power, acting as if they have the full authority of the law

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