Elon Musk's AI company is teaming up with right-leaning legal activists and the Trump administration to strip Americans of a decades-old right to sue over violations of federal law — and the billionaire class couldn't be more united about it.

Citizen suits — embedded in environmental, campaign finance, and other statutes — give ordinary Americans the power to enforce the law when the government won't. They've extracted millions from polluting oil and gas operations and forced the removal of lead pipes in Flint, Michigan. Now, xAI, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the Trump administration want the Supreme Court to declare them unconstitutional, arguing that only the president and federal agencies should decide whether to enforce the law at all.

The legal theory is unitary executive power on steroids. The argument, as both outlets report, is that the Constitution reserves "tremendous power for the president and federal agencies to decide how — or whether at all — to enforce federal law." Translation: if the government chooses to look the other way while a powerful company breaks the law, you can't do a thing about it.

The Pacific Legal Foundation picked its test case carefully: Springfield, Tennessee, population 19,000, facing a routine Clean Water Act citizen suit from Tennessee Riverkeeper over sewage flowing from its treatment plant into a nearby creek. It was the thirty-first such suit Riverkeeper has filed since 2010. Pacific Legal's argument — that a private group of unelected citizens shouldn't hold this enforcement power — is the thin end of a very large wedge.

Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, with decades of experience in environmental law, put it plainly: "Many of us who worked in this area have been waiting basically 26 years for this shoe to drop."

That shoe has been hanging since 2000, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that citizen suits raised "difficult and fundamental" questions about whether they improperly dilute executive power. Justice Antonin Scalia went further in dissent, writing that citizen suits turn "over to private citizens the function of enforcing the law." He stopped short of calling them unconstitutional — but today's court doesn't have that hesitation.

"The court is more like Scalia's court since he died than it ever was when he was there," Lazarus observed. Those who lost cases where Scalia dissented are rushing back, betting on a more favorable result.

Four federal cases are now pending, including one filed just last week. The strategy is deliberate: win early cases, create disagreement between appeals courts, and give the Supreme Court a reason to issue a nationwide ruling.

Here's what the opponents don't advertise: citizen suits require the government to be notified ahead of time. The government can step in and take over if it pursues the case itself. Fines go to the U.S. Treasury, not to trial lawyers. This isn't a gravy train — it's Americans forcing compliance with laws Congress already passed.

Pro-tech doesn't mean pro-immunity. The same people who champion free speech and rail against government overreach are now arguing that only the government should have the power to enforce the law. The founders didn't fight a revolution to hand all enforcement power back to the crown. The question isn't whether you like Musk or trust the bureaucracy — it's whether a citizen with a grievance keeps a day in court, or whether that right dies at the whim of an agency that answers to nobody.