Former President Donald Trump’s top lawyer put it bluntly when speaking at a conservative conference five years ago: The goal was to name judges who would help further the administration’s deregulation agenda.

“There is a coherent plan here where actually the judicial selection and the deregulatory effort are really the flip side of the same coin,” White House counsel Don McGahn said onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018.

That plan is bearing fruit. The Supreme Court’s new nine-month term starts Monday, with three major cases shaped by Trump-appointed judges that could hobble federal agencies already on the docket.

The process started when, among other things, prospective Trump nominees were probed about their views on federal agency authority as their records were scrutinized for expertise on the issue, something previous administrations had not done, McGahn said. He cited Justice Neil Gorsuch, then recently appointed to the Supreme Court, as an example of what the White House was looking for.

[Trump, to his credit, did a great job vetting and nominating these judges, and McConnell did a terrific job ramming these guys through. Rarely do we actually get what we elected people for, but in this case, we most certainly did. ~ Beege]