NEW YORK -- The study (conducted by Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School and Aaron Belkin of San Francisco State University) focuses on the views of Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been carefully but steadily leading the court into a position to protect conservative interests on a broad range of issues — most particularly those involving economic privilege. Some of the issues they raise — particularly the hostility of conservative jurists to delegation of congressional authority to agencies or state governments — illustrate opportunities the Roberts Court could have to slow down or hamstring climate-change action even if it declines to make a frontal assault.
It should be noted that Moyn and Belkin are both associated with a progressive group — Take Back the Court — that advocates radical solutions to obstruction by the court, including expansion of the number of Justices serving on SCOTUS. But they credibly cite the urgency of the climate-change challenge to point to an earlier occasion — the Great Depression — when reactionaries on the court became an immovable object resisting the irresistible force of the original New Deal.