Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch with Chief Justice John Roberts Win McNamee/Getty

This kind of action opens the door to the slow decimation of the administrative state. Executive branch agencies can’t function nimbly unless they’re given broad latitude to interpret the laws passed by Congress. An EPA that couldn’t rely on that leeway would need Congress constantly to pass new laws directing it how to proceed on every matter in its purview and then pass additional new laws covering the same ground as circumstances changed.

Friday’s decision signals that the Supreme Court plans to take back the authority to make broad interpretations rather than continue to grant latitude to the executive branch. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has written, the courts would “gain a broad new power to strike down federal regulations, on the grounds that they exceed Congress’s power to delegate authority.”

“In theory,” Millhiser writes, “that could mean that federal regulations will simply receive more scrutiny from an impartial judiciary.” But with a 6–3 conservative supermajority, the court gains “the ability to veto nearly any regulation handed down by a Democratic administration.” This could kneecap President Biden’s ability to enact climate protections and beyond.

The Supreme Court’s conservatives are telling on themselves in two ways. First, they’re signaling that a larger judicial war against the administrative state is about to kick off in earnest and that they will take aim at the mechanisms that allow Congress and executive branch agencies to respond to the needs of ordinary Americans. This is bad news for Democrats specifically, as the GOP typically makes little effort to pass regulations or make the federal government more functional, and thus has less to lose in a world in which executive branch agencies can’t act without the say-so of a conservative judiciary.

This fact naturally leads to the second reveal: For all the effort expended over the past few months by Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Stephen Breyer to convince us that they are impartial callers of balls and strikes, and not political actors, last Friday’s decision effectively debunks that notion. After all, what could be more “political” than announcing an intention to discard a legal maxim that’s stood since the nation’s founding in a Friday news dump, just as the president was on his way to an international climate conference? We should be under no illusion about what the Supreme Court intends to do—and how soon it plans to do it.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

From Atop The Soapbox

This week at The Soapbox, Matt Ford covered oral arguments at the Supreme Court rather extensively. You can follow his work by clicking on the links above. The Virginia gubernatorial election also occupied a lot of our time: Daniel Strauss talked to Democrats who saw the disaster unfolding in advance, and Michael Tomasky provided a postmortem. Faiz Shakir urged President Biden to go on offense, and Grace Segers surveyed the mood on Capitol Hill and how McAuliffe’s loss might affect the effort to pass Biden’s agenda. Elsewhere, Casey Michel discussed how Biden’s plan to revive the IRS could be a big boon to the country. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban’s plan to fix pharmaceutical prices has left Natalie Shure very skeptical. Alex Shephard argued that the GOP will never quite shake Trump because they all embrace his delusional belief in election fraud—even as they strive to suppress and subvert the right to vote.