For more than thirty years, Republicans in all three branches of the national government worked to overturn Chevron and eliminate judicial deference to administrative agencies. As former White House counsel Don McGahn explained, their objective was “to corral the runaway bureaucracy to get judges in place who were actually going to read the law as it was written.” For former Senate Majority Leader and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, ending Chevron deference was a singular priority, even more important than reversing Roe v. Wade. Republicans finally got their wish when the Court overturned Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo in 2024.

With the benefit of two years’ time, what have we learned about where the Republican Party is headed in the wake of such a big win—and what can that teach us about the importance of legal doctrine in constituting a party coalition?

It seems apparent in retrospect that opposition to Chevron helped to bind the modern Republican coalition together. Even before the case was decided in 1984, proposals to amend the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to prohibit judicial deference channeled the traditional business conservative view that deference encouraged costly agency regulation. Proponents emphasized the explosive growth of “paperwork . . . rules, and . . . redtape [sic].” The chief sponsor of a bill to codify de novo review of ambiguous statutes defended the measure on the ground that regulations were “stifl[ing]” the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people.

Between Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and Barack Obama’s in 2008, antistatist conservatives joined the fight against judicial deference. Supported by an array of institutions in the Republican orbit, including the Koch political network, Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, and Liberty Fund Network, they assailed Chevron from a different vantage. The entire administrative state, they argued, is constitutionally and democratically illegitimate. Thus, while it was “perfectly reasonable for the courts to defer to Congress’s view of its powers . . . that logic does not apply to unelected bureaucrats.” Their rhetoric dramatically increased Chevron’s salience and, as Gillian Metzger has observed, the decision eventually became a “stand-in for administrative government writ large.”

It remains an open question whether business-minded conservatives and antistatist conservatives can maintain their previously productive alliance now that Chevron is no longer a common enemy. For their part, antistatist conservatives have continued to assail administrative governance. In this very blog, for instance, Missouri Republican senator Eric Schmitt declared that “Loper Bright was not the end of the war. It was the end of one battle and the beginning of a new one” to reclaim the mantle of governance “from anonymous bureaucrats who never stand for election.” According to Schmitt—who in 2025 chaired a “Post-Chevron working group” composed of nearly half the Senate Republican conference—conservatives now have “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild the constitutional order we were meant to inherit from our Framers.” Those who see Loper Bright as a “turning point in the history of the Republic” have powerful allies. They include some of the Court’s conservative justices—most prominently, Justice Neil Gorsuch—as well as “a well-funded network of libertarian paralegal institutions” that remains committed to battling the administrative state.

But it is not clear that more traditional business conservatives want to keep up the fight. Groups representing business interests, along with large-scale businesses themselves, have long been tolerant of some regulatory activity. Indeed, many scholars believe that large businesses view regulation as a competitive advantage. Unlike their smaller competitors, they can absorb and pass on the costs of compliance. By the same token, regulation is susceptible to cooptation (or even capture) by already-powerful business interests who can shape the regulatory environment to their liking. Political scientist Steven Teles, for instance, notes that this tendency to accept a middle ground was a serious liability for conservative public interest groups in the 1970s. While conservative groups were eager to challenge regnant liberal institutional rules and structures, “businesses were highly risk-adverse [and] hesitant to alienate their stakeholders by taking strong, ideologically charged stands.” The fact that Chevron,for all its ills, also created a relatively stable and consistent regulatory environment adds another wrinkle to the story. Under Loper Bright,the authority to resolve significant statutory interpretation questions is vested in individual judges. To the extent this yields greater variation or inconsistency, the costs of compliance of businesses are likely to go up—substantially.

The real wild card is the latest entrant into the Republican coalition, a faction we might label “strong-state” conservatives. Unlike business-oriented and antistatist conservatives, members of this Republican faction have expressed indifference to traditional conservative bugaboos like limiting state involvement in the economy. As political scientist Theda Skocpol observes, they have instead been critical of “the sorts of cuts in major social programs pushed by free-market elites,” preferring to see cuts only in “benefits [that] go to unworthy recipients who have not worked for them.”

Under Trump 2.0, this faction may be wielding ever more influence. After urging the CEO of Intel (the computer chip-designer and fabricator) to resign due to ties with China, President Trump demanded that the federal government receive a 10% equity stake in the company in exchange for an $8.9 billion investment in its manufacturing capacity. The president has personally struck deals for foreign direct investment in the domestic AI industry. And he has negotiated export-control workarounds with individual companies in exchange for a percentage of the sales. As a report for the Council on Foreign Relations recently summarized: “Together, these actions presage a new chapter for the world’s largest economy: American state capitalism.” The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator calls this approach a “hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”

It isn’t yet clear how strong-state conservatives feel about the new Loper Bright equilibrium. But there are reasons to think they might actually prefer a status quo closer to Chevron than Loper Bright. For one, strong-state conservates are clearly enthusiastic about executive power. And under Trump, the exercise of executive power has often involved aggressive and novel readings by agencies of existing statutes, like the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—readings the federal courts will have difficulty upholding absent a theory of administrative deference (as the Court’s recent ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump illustrates). Deference is an especially useful tool for an administration that, like this one, has largely eschewed working with Congress to enact new statutes or revise old ones, instead relying on executive-branch officials to interpret existing law in pursuit of the president’s objectives.

Given these commitments, strong-state conservatives might be more open to Chevron-style deference for the same reasons that Justice Antonin Scalia once championed the doctrine. Not only did Scalia derisively characterize congressional measures to limit agency deference as “executive-enfeebling,” but he later declared “[b]road delegation to the Executive” to be “the hallmark of the modern administrative state.”

As I argue in a longer symposium essay for the Loyola Chicago Law Journal, all of this suggests that political coalitions might be careful what they wish for. Opposition to a longstanding judicial precedent can help bind interests with otherwise-divergent goals together. Shared dislike of a common enemy demands relatively little of those who come together to topple it. They are free to publicize their hostility without having to propose a mutually acceptable alternative. But the demise of precedent can destabilize those arrangements, with uncertain consequences for coalition partners. The new equilibrium demands that they agree on what they are now for—that is, how they propose to fill the resulting doctrinal vacuum. Old allies must decide whether to collectively push for more or settle for what they have already achieved, an endeavor that tends to require arduous negotiation and hard-won compromise. We are still in the early days of the revolution. What we can say for now is that ending Chevron might have been the easy part. What comes next is harder to predict.

Gregory A. Elinson is an Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law.