The government shows up at your business and demands you pay the salaries of the regulators who lord over you. If you refuse, you’ll be ruined. You have little recourse. You’ve never even voted on the policy because no law implementing it exists. Bureaucrats in D.C. cooked up the idea, and a political appointee signed off on it.

That’s what Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case brought by New England fishermen against Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, is all about. It may finally end or weaken Chevron deference, which refers to a 1984 decision that inadvertently empowered the administrative state to take wide-ranging, illiberal powers over American economic life.

I mean, the case of the fishermen is basically a modern reenactment of “taxation without representation.”

Yet when the Supreme Court took up oral arguments in Raimondo, the three leftist judges didn’t focus on the constitutionality of Chevron deference, but rather lamented the alleged problems of stripping government experts of their power.

[This is so obvious as to be axiomatic. Federal agencies and their regulatory power are not “democracy” at all, but instead technocratic rule made possible by the abdication of the two electoral branches of the US government. That goes well beyond the Chevron deference issue, though; the ‘repeal’ of the doctrine will have the end result of making the judiciary decide these issues. To return to democracy, or more accurately lawmaking by elected representatives rather than unelected bureaucrats, Congress will have to void the enabling statutes that set up these technocrats in the first place. — Ed]