By EMILY BAZELON and ERIC POSNER – The New York Times

At recent Senate hearings to fill the Supreme Court’s open seat, Judge Neil Gorsuch came across as a thoroughly bland and nonthreatening nominee. The idea was to give as little ammunition as possible to opponents when his nomination comes up this week for a vote, one that Senate Democrats may try to upend with a filibuster.

But the reality is that Judge Gorsuch embraces a judicial philosophy that would do nothing less than undermine the structure of modern government — including the rules that keep our water clean, regulate the financial markets and protect workers and consumers. In strongly opposing the administrative state, Judge Gorsuch is in the company of incendiary figures like the White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has called for its “deconstruction.” The Republican-dominated House, too, has passed a bill designed to severely curtail the power of federal agencies.

Businesses have always complained that government regulations increase their costs, and no doubt some regulations are ill-conceived. But a small group of conservative intellectuals have gone much further to argue that the rules that safeguard our welfare and the orderly functioning of the market have been fashioned in a way that’s not constitutionally legitimate. This once-fringe cause of the right asserts, as Judge Gorsuch put it in a speech last year, that the administrative state “poses a grave threat to our values of personal liberty.”

The 80 years of law that are at stake began with the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that the Great Depression was caused in part by ruinous competition among companies. In 1933, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the president to approve “fair competition” standards for different trades and industries. The next year, Roosevelt approved a code for the poultry industry, which, among other things, set a minimum wage and maximum hours for workers, and hygiene requirements for slaughterhouses. Such basic workplace protections and constraints on the free market are now taken for granted.

But in 1935, after a New York City slaughterhouse operator was convicted of violating the poultry code, the Supreme Court called into question the whole approach of the New Deal, by holding that the N.I.R.A. was an “unconstitutional delegation by Congress of a legislative power.” Only Congress can create rules like the poultry code, the justices said. Because Congress did not define “fair competition,” leaving the rule-making to the president, the N.I.R.A. violated the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The court’s ruling in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. the United States, along with another case decided the same year, are the only instances in which the Supreme Court has ever struck down a federal statute based on this rationale, known as the “nondelegation doctrine.” Schechter Poultry’s stand against executive-branch rule-making proved to be a legal dead end, and for good reason. As the court has recognized over and over, before and since 1935, Congress is a cumbersome body that moves slowly in the best of times, while the economy is an incredibly dynamic system. For the sake of business as well as labor, the updating of regulations can’t wait for Congress to give highly specific and detailed directions.

The New Deal filled the gap by giving policy-making authority to agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, which protects investors, and the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees collective bargaining between unions and employers. Later came other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (which regulates workplace safety) and the Department of Homeland Security. Still other agencies regulate the broadcast spectrum, keep the national parks open, help farmers and assist Americans who are overseas. Administrative agencies coordinated the response to Sept. 11, kept the Ebola outbreak in check and were instrumental to ending the last financial crisis. They regulate the safety of food, drugs, airplanes and nuclear power plants. The administrative state isn’t optional in our complex society. It’s indispensable.

But if the regulatory power of this arm of government is necessary, it also poses a risk that federal agencies, with their large bureaucracies and potential ties to lobbyists, could abuse their power. Congress sought to address that concern in 1946, by passing the Administrative Procedure Act, which ensured a role for the judiciary in overseeing rule-making by agencies.

The system worked well enough for decades, but questions arose when Ronald Reagan came to power promising to deregulate. His E.P.A. sought to weaken a rule, issued by the Carter administration, which called for regulating “stationary sources” of air pollution — a broad wording that is open to interpretation. When President Reagan’s E.P.A. narrowed the definition of what counted as a “stationary source” to allow plants to emit more pollutants, an environmental group challenged the agency. The Supreme Court held in 1984 in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that the E.P.A. (and any agency) could determine the meaning of an ambiguous term in the law. The rule came to be known as Chevron deference: When Congress uses ambiguous language in a statute, courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of what the words mean.

Chevron was not viewed as a left-leaning decision. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Reagan administration, after all, voting 6 to 0 (three justices did not take part), and spanning the ideological spectrum. After the conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia reached the Supreme Court, he declared himself a Chevron fan. “In the long run Chevron will endure,” Justice Scalia wrote in a 1989 article, “because it more accurately reflects the reality of government, and thus more adequately serves its needs.”

That was then. But the Reagan administration’s effort to cut back on regulation ran out of steam. It turned out that the public often likes regulation — because it keeps the air and water clean, the workplace safe and the financial system in working order. Deregulation of the financial system led to the savings-and-loans crisis of the 1980s and the financial crisis a decade ago, costing taxpayers billions.

Businesses, however, have continued to complain that the federal government regulates too much. In the past 20 years, conservative legal scholars have bolstered the red-tape critique with a constitutional one. They argued that only Congress — not agencies — can create rules. This is Schechter Poultry all over again.

And Judge Gorsuch has forcefully joined in. Last year, in a concurring opinion in an immigration case called Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, he attacked Chevron deference, writing that the rule “certainly seems to have added prodigious new powers to an already titanic administrative state.” Remarkably, Judge Gorsuch argued that Chevron — one of the most frequently cited cases in the legal canon — is illegitimate in part because it is out of step with (you guessed it) Schechter Poultry. Never mind that the Supreme Court hasn’t since relied on its 1935 attempt to scuttle the New Deal. Nonetheless, Judge Gorsuch wrote that in light of Schechter Poultry, “you might ask how is it that Chevron — a rule that invests agencies with pretty unfettered power to regulate a lot more than chicken — can evade the chopping block.”

At his confirmation hearings, Judge Gorsuch hinted that he might vote to overturn Chevron without saying so directly, noting that the administrative state existed long before Chevron was decided in 1984. The implication is that little would change if courts stopped deferring to the E.P.A.’s or the Department of Labor’s reading of a statute. Judges would interpret the law. Who could object to that?

But here’s the thing: Judge Gorsuch is skeptical that Congress can use broadly written laws to delegate authority to agencies in the first place. That can mean only that at least portions of such statutes — the source of so many regulations that safeguard Americans’ welfare — must be sent back to Congress, to redo or not.

On the current Supreme Court, only Justice Clarence Thomas seeks to strip power from the administrative state by undercutting Chevron and even reviving the obsolete and discredited nondelegation doctrine, as he explains in opinions approvingly cited by Judge Gorsuch. But President Trump may well appoint additional justices, and the other conservatives on the court have expressed some uneasiness with Chevron, though as yet they are not on board for overturning it. What would happen if agencies could not make rules for the financial industry and for consumer, environmental and workplace protection? Decades of experience in the United States and around the world teach that the administrative state is a necessary part of the modern market economy. With Judge Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, we will be one step closer to testing that premise.