Supreme Court's overturning of 40-year Chevron ruling is a win for the Trump deregulatory agenda

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has been out of office for more than three years, but he just notched a big win at the Supreme Court.

Friday’s ruling that overturned an important 1984 ruling called Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was a belated victory for Trump’s deregulatory agenda, with all three of his appointees to the high court joining the 6-3 conservative majority.

“The decision was the culmination of a decades-long, billionaire-funded campaign to capture and weaponize the unelected power of the Supreme Court to deliver huge windfalls for corporate interests at the expense of everyday Americans,” said Alex Aronson, a former Democratic staffer in Congress who is executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial oversight group.

During the Trump administration, the Republican-led Senate, which had the job of confirming the president’s judicial nominees, “became a conveyor belt for ideological, corporatist judges,” he added.

Business groups hailed the ruling, with the National Federation of Independent Business saying on Friday that it will “level the playing field in court cases between small businesses and administrative agencies.”

Overturning Chevron, a ruling that business interests long disliked, has long been a goal of conservative lawyers, who saw it as giving bureaucrats too much power.

The original decision said courts should defer to federal agencies in interpreting laws that were ambiguous, but in Friday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts said that approach was “fundamentally misguided.”

“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do,” he added.

Don McGahn, Trump’s White