The Patience of Evil
By 
I can’t wait to publish this obituary…
The 2019 Seafood Expo North America in Boston featured an oyster-shucking contest, whole squid on ice and some surprising attendees: attorneys from the powerful political network of Charles Koch,a billionaire who has spent decades and millions fighting government regulation.
They weren’t there for the seafood samples. They were fishing for fishermen, seeking stories of boatcaptains upset by federal regulations that would soonrequire herring fishermen topay for onboard government monitors.
The outreach demonstrated the unusually broad coordination by the Koch network to challengea bedrock legal precedent that had touched many aspects of American life — from drugs and the environment to banking and workplace safety.
That effortculminated in June when theSupreme Court struck down the principle known as Chevron deference,which for 40 years had required judgesto give federal agencies significant latitude in implementing laws in areas where Congress did not give specific guidance.
Other Supreme Courtdecisions last term garnered more attention, including on abortion pills and presidential immunity.But many legal experts sayChevron could be one of the most significant rulings of this generation because of its sweep.
The legal precedent had been cited in more than 18,000 decisions over the past four decades. Its demisehas unleashed a newflood of challenges to the regulatory power of federal agencies,and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seized on it last month as a key tool in their quest to slash thousands of federal jobs and dismantle bureaucracy as part of the incoming Trump administration.
This is the inside story of how a network of interconnected organizations — with common employees and funding from Koch and wealthy like-minded donors — spent years strategizing how to take down Chevron, ultimately finding the test case they needed to upend decades of precedent.
I hate these people so very, very much. Greed has won in America.