The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Monday morning in West Virginia v. EPA, where red states and coal companies are asking the Court to dramatically limit the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“Supreme Court Hears Effort To Cripple EPA On Climate Change”
Well, this should be rich, right?
Another opportunity for the right wing Injustices to cripple the federal government. Yippee! Yeah, let’s make protection of the environment a state responsibility only! Why, that liberal freedom-stealing EPA was founded by that notorious commie-rat Democrat, Richard Nixon.
I guess the Justices with children (because if you don’t, then who cares, right?) figure they’ll simply buy their way out of climate catastrophes and polluted air and water. But what about the help?
The EPA was gutted during Trump, so it has taken time just to find their feet again. A good example is PFAS "forever chemical rules. The PFAS rules in the US are just getting finalized, while the EU has already got a ban on 200 PFAS chemicals in 2023. You would think Gorsuch would be happy with this state of affairs and consider this mother’s snub as EPA head revenged. Apparently not.
This is the endgame for the “dark money” powers. They want to eliminate government regulation completely. That would lead to very, very bad things.
ETA; This “major questions” issue is complete and utter bullshit because 1) the EPA is not going to enforce the Clean Power Act and 2) Congress does not have to ok every single action by a federal agency. They delegate such powers to said agencies because replacing regulators with legislators is madness. This is Brother Koch and his allies trying to eliminate government regulation in its entirety. He can’t be allowed to win this one.
‘promote the general welfare’ is nothing more than constitutional argle-bargle in the eyes of the wingnuts. And wingnut ideology is very important to our current scotus.
It’s worse than that; some of the justices believe they can read the minds of men who died 200+ years ago and determine their “original intent” from broadly-written and purposely ambiguous phrases in the Constitution.
If the Supreme Court prevents the EPA from regulating coal plants, Biden should have the military bomb them. It is better than doing nothing, and his power of the military is unrestrained. I’m only half kidding here. Climate change is more important than anything else.
Original intent is a thing for just about everybody when it comes to constitutional and statutory interpretation. To the extent there is any principled disagreement – and I have largely abandoned the notion that there is any principled disagreement – it comes down to whether the words were intended to capture anything that those enacting them might not have considered at the time.
And in general, I think it’s fairly obvious that more specific language means more specific requirements, while more general language (i.e., Due Process and Equal Protection) were plainly intended to be flexible and open-ended.