The New York Times published a revealing, but not surprising, survey of how the three Trump appointees to the Supreme Court came to be. The article makes crystal clear that the priority of Don McGahn, the White House Counsel, and Senator Mitch McConnell, was always the administrative state, and not social issues like abortion.
While much of the attention to the conservative-dominated court has been about the sweeping decisions it has made to roll back abortion rights and now greatly expand presidential immunity, that was never the main goal for the architects of the effort to pull the judiciary to the right.
For those who led the drive to place Justice Gorsuch and two other conservatives on the court during the Trump administration, a sweeping series of rulings by the Supreme Court this year that shrank the power of federal agencies was the true victory. Their longtime target, the so-called administrative state, has been beaten back with the overturning of the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine and a flurry of other decisions aimed at reining in federal government reach — just as they envisioned it.
McGahn acknowledges that Chevron was always the primary objective:
