Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on They win we lose.

A short list of reasons why I think this is silly:

1) It’s usually much harder to sue the government for things it has failed to do than things it has done. This is especially true when you’re trying to sue because the government didn’t do stuff to that guy/corporation over there.

2) Related to point (1), there are likely some major standing problems. An industry that is aggrieved by a regulation it contends is too restrictive has an obvious injury it can point to — we’re losing money because of this regulation. Environmental groups have to rely on more indirect theories — our members are people, and people will suffer from climate change if this isn’t done — and SCOTUS has been trimming back that kind of standing for years now.

3) You won’t “DDOS” the courts. You’ll add a few cases to the dockets of the district court judges in the 9th Circuit where you propose to file these things. If you actually manage to file enough of them to annoy the judges, they’ll just start issuing boilerplate Orders to Show Cause why your case shouldn’t be dismissed, and they’ll quickly get disposed of. Keep filing them, and you’ll eventually exhaust their patience and get yourself sanctioned.

4) Even if you could overburden the district courts, SCOTUS ain’t gonna care, and neither will a Trump administration.

Basically, this is an Underpants Gnome strategy:

Step 1: File lots of borderline frivolous lawsuits

Step 2: ?????

Step 3: Victory!

Now, to extract a serious point out of all this: sure, in principle Chevron isn’t inherently conservative or liberal. The case actually originated out of a challenge to the Reagan Administration’s EPA, run by now-Justice Gorsuch’s mother.

The problems are:

1) It’s an asymmetric battle. Industry groups have the resources and incentives to fight every fight. Environmental and consumer groups tend to be much more limited and have to pick their battles.

2) Conservatives rule the courts. Oh, you got some district court judge in California to order Trump’s EPA to do something? And the Ninth Circuit denied the government’s emergency appeal? How nice for you, bravo, bet you spent a lot of time and money on that. Well, Scotus just issued a stay in a one-sentence order on the shadow docket, so there goes that.