What was albaby saying about not being able to get around procedures and law because of the judiciary? When the judiciary is clearly sycophantic?

Different scenario, different situation.

You can get a judge to make a weird call if it's completely case-specific. You can get a single district judge who wants to promote some crazy theory of the law and send it up the chain for test choices. Not the judiciary - a judge.

But that's not the APA. The APA gets applied every time an agency makes a rule, and virtually every controversial rule gets challenged by someone under the APA. There's so much precedent on what it means and how it is to be applied, over nearly 80 years. Every circuit has expansive precedent on it.

So if the Trump administration does something that violates the APA, a suit will be filed in a district where most of the circuit court judges weren't appointed by him. So even if you draw a district judge with weird ideas about the APA, it will hit an appeals court that's just going to follow its precedent.

And that's even before we get into the merits. The APA is a limit on regulation. Not an especially powerful one, to be sure - but a limit nonetheless. It is how Congress has restricted how agencies make new rules, which is something that conservative justices - even the ones Trump has appointed - tend to support.