Since @WaitWait is off this week... it's time for some (ducks into phone book, puts on tweed jacket with elbow patches) FAKE CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLARSHIP! (I'm not a legal scholar, but I kinda played one once on TV!)
As we get discuss the President's SCOTUS nomination, there will be LOTS of talk about Roe (abortion) and Obergefell (gay marriage.) And there should be! Those rulings are in danger! (I agree with @JeffreyToobin: abortion will be illegal in half the US by 2020.)
But we should also talk about two rulings that don't get as much attention but are central to goals of conservative legal scholars: Chevron and Wickard v Fillburn.
"Chevron is a 1984 case that created what's called "the Chevron deference," or the power of Government agencies to decide how regulations are implemented. It created what critics call "the administrative state" or "the rule of unelected bureaucrats!" and conservatives hate it.
If overturned, corporations could defy regulators anytime they felt an agency overstepped its strict legislative bounds, and win. Look for cases challenging Chevron to start working their way through state and fed dockets.
"Wickard" is an even deeper cut. It was a WW2 era case that determined that the US government could regulate "commerce" even if was a guy growing a regulated crop for his own use on his own farm.
Scholars see it (approvingly or not) as providing the legal basis for the vast regulatory state we now live under. It expanded the Constitution's "commerce clause" to basically include all economic activity everywhere. And conservative scholars hate it.
People like the Koch Brothers and other very wealthy conservative donors may or may not care about abortion -- I have no idea. But they care deeply about limiting the Government's power to regulate or control what people do with their own money and property.
So: at your next cocktail party, when people are saying, "I'm really worried about Roe," say, "Well, I'm more worried about Chevron," and then pretend, like me, to know what you're talking about.
