Supreme Court Ends Term by Sabotaging Fight Against Climate Change
The same 6-3 conservative majority that struck down Roe v. Wade ended its destructive term Thursday by sharply constraining the Environmental Protection Administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on abortion, Chief Justice John Roberts quibbled with the scope of the Court’s demolition of precedents. But in West Virginia v. EPA, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stopping the EPA from adjusting its regulatory regime without a new, explicit grant of authority from Congress. It’s a crippling blow to the fight against climate change at a time when the Senate filibuster keeps Congress from acting; it also has troubling implications for the power of federal agencies generally to perform tasks assigned by lawmakers.
The basis of the decision is the “major questions doctrine,” which Court conservatives recently used to strike down COVID-related regulations on housing evictions and workplace safety. As the Congressional Research Service explained, the doctrine rejects federal agencies’ claims of regulatory authority “when (1) the underlying claim of authority concerns an issue of ‘vast “economic and political significance,”’ and (2) Congress has not clearly empowered the agency with authority over the issue.”
On occasion, courts have treated the major-questions doctrine as an exception to the general rule that courts defer to agencies’ interpretations of their own authority (so-called Chevron deference); but more recently, as in this case, it’s a freestanding objection to the subject matters on which agencies can rule expansively. Because the Obama-era Clean Power Plan shifted the EPA’s Clean Air Act strategy from the imposition of better technology on coal-fired power plants to “generation shifting” requirements mandating cleaner sources, Roberts says, it outstripped its original authority.
Part of what makes the decision an example of conservative judicial activism is its timing: The Trump administration replaced the Clean Power Plan with its own (weaker) regime for utility emissions, which in turn was revoked by the Biden administration. But the Biden administration did not reimpose the Obama regulations; it simply announced it would soon develop a new enforcement scheme. As Justice Elena Kagan notes in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer (on his last day on the Court), the conservatives were very eager to leap into these unsettled waters:
Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/supreme-court-sabotages-epa-fight-against-climate-change.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I guess they anticipate some construction work done on their bench.
I feel sick.
