As the Senate gets set to vote on President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the New York Times is issuing an op-ed piece warning that the administrative state is in danger. No reason why it shouldn’t do so. The voters certainly made it clear that they wanted to move against the administrative state. The first thing that caught our eye about the piece, though, is its authors — Emily Bazelon and Eric Posner.

Both as lawyers and writers, each has made a name in her or his own right. They are, though, also scions of two of the most famous liberal judges ever to ride a federal appeals circuit. One is the granddaughter of David Bazelon, who rode the District of Columbia circuit for nearly 30 years, half of them as chief judge. The other is the son of Richard Posner, who rides the 7th circuit and was once its chief judge. He is a fallen away conservative who moved left.

It strikes us as fitting that the Times is turning at this juncture to two stars of legacy legal liberalism to warn against Judge Gorsuch. He is famously opposed to what is called “Chevron deference,” the notion that when statute is ambiguous, judges ought to defer to administrative agencies. The principle was established by the Supreme Court in a case in which environmentalists lost a suit in a dispute with the big oil company Chevron.

We have run Chevron through the Sun’s Madison-brand Hi-Speed Gasoline Powered Law and Logic Separator without finding in the decision a single kernel of logic. Why, if the law is unclear, should one side get preference over the other? Why not send the matter back to Congress? In any event, the deference that the court held must be given to administrative agencies has handed power to those who dominate the administrative arms of the government, which often means the left.

Ms. Bazelon and Mr. Posner take the feud all the way back to the Schechter Poultry case, in which the Supreme Court put the main regulatory engine of the New Deal — the National Recovery Administration — out of business. It reckoned the Congress had delegated too much power. That was the decision that ignited FDR’s effort to pack the Supreme Court. It’s been eroded but never overturned, and liberals fear Judge Gorsuch may lead on the high court an attempt to rebuild the non-delegation principle in Schechter.

One of the ways the New York Times reacted to Schechter when it was handed down at 1935 was to issue an editorial called “John Marshall,” extolling the Chief Justice who, in Marbury v. Madison, established the Court’s authority to rule a law unconstitutional. It defended Marshall against the insults of President Jefferson, who the Times said, had a “bitter tongue.” It quoted Jefferson as saying Marshall was given over to “cunning and sophistry.” (When it came to berating judges, it seems Jefferson made Mr. Trump look like a piker.) It also suggested future generations would adjust to Schechter.

We wouldn’t suggest that the Times of today be bound by its opinion in Schechter any more than the Supreme Court is bound by, say, Chevron. We would suggest the Democrats are trying to buffalo the Senate into panicking that the elevation of Judge Gorsuch to the high bench could bring down the administrative state. The real way to bury the administrative state is to win over the various states, which Donald Trump just did. It’s been decades since we’ve had a candidate who stood so clearly for deregulation. It’s no small thing that the states chose him by a margin of 304 electors to 227.