Eight years ago, at the dawn of the first Trump presidency, the White House was the locus of an ambitious project to weaken the president.

Justice Antonin Scalia was dead. GOP senators had kept his seat on the Supreme Court vacant for more than a year, in order to ensure that it would be filled by a Republican. And President Donald Trump’s top legal aides were weighing who he should appoint.

At the time, the Republican Party’s traditional constituents — business and small-government conservatives — were still the primary drivers of GOP policy. Trump had not yet converted his party into a cult of personality centered on his expansive use of power, and the lawyers who dominated his judicial selection process remained committed to a weaker executive branch.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Colorado, who was largely unknown outside of the legal profession, had spent the years leading up to Trump’s first election auditioning for a seat on the nation’s highest Court. The scion of a Republican noble family — his mother led the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan — then-Judge Neil Gorsuch spent his final years on a lower court calling for a massive power shift away from the executive branch of the US government and toward the judiciary.

Among other things, Gorsuch argued that the Supreme Court should overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), a seminal decision instructing courts to defer to policy judgments made by federal agencies. He also advocated for reviving an out-of-fashion legal concept called the nondelegation doctrine, which gives judges broad discretion to strike down laws delegating power to the executive.

Gorsuch’s narrow view of executive power, as journalist David Kaplan reported in a 2018 book, “proved decisive in clinching” the Trump White House’s decision to place Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. At the time, the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group that Trump relied on to select many of his first-term judges, was obsessively committed to weakening the executive branch’s power to regulate. And no judge had done more to align himself with this broader agenda than Neil Gorsuch.

Flash-forward to the present, and Gorsuch seems........

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