Supreme Court Limits Environmental Protection Agency's Authority
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a decision limiting the power of regulatory agencies within the federal government, saying the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority in 2015 when it tried to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.
West Virginia led a coalition of Republican-leaning states and coal producers that asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and clarify the limits of the Environmental Protection Agency's authority, raising broader questions about how far the regulatory authority of federal agencies extends. The coalition said powerful and wide-reaching policies should come from Congress, not agency-level regulators.
The Obama-era EPA rules were “illustrative of an alarming trend whereby presidents turn to implied authority, typically in long-extant statutes, to achieve what Congress fails to do,” the libertarian Cato Institute said in a legal brief.
The case before the high court was unusual because it involved regulations put forth by the Obama administration that never went into effect and were replaced in 2019 under the Trump administration. At issue was the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era set of rules devised by the EPA that sought to mandate a national shift away from coal to cleaner sources of power, including natural gas, wind and solar.
For half a century, the Clean Air Act has directed the EPA to regulate stationary sources of air pollution that endanger “public health or welfare.” The Obama-era Clean Power Plan extended that regulatory reach beyond the physical premises of a power plant to allow off-site methods to mitigate pollution.
The Supreme Court in 2016 halted the Clean Power Plan from taking effect , but the justices never directly addressed whether the rule was unlawful. The Trump administration in 2019 overturned the plan , replacing it with industry-friendly rules allowing older power plants to continue operating.
In January 2021, at the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia struck down his administration’s replacement rule , providing the Biden administration with a clean slate to work from in devising its own carbon-emissions rules.
The EPA powers at issue are central to Mr. Biden’s climate agenda. With fragile majorities in the Senate and House, Democrats have limited ability to advance their platform through new legislation. Like his recent predecessors, Mr. Biden is poised to govern through agencies such as the EPA, relying on his inherent constitutional authority and the statutory powers provided by existing legislation.
Presidents from both parties have increasingly governed by executive order when their agendas are stalled in Congress, often giving regulators vast power over swaths of the economy.
Many conservative lawyers have criticized this expansion of regulatory power, saying it isn’t consistent with the “separation of powers” framework in the Constitution. Some liberals have defended the shift toward administrative governance, which can traced back to the New Deal, saying Congress can and should delegate authority to agencies with more expertise.
Some energy businesses outside the coal industry expressed support for the EPA’s existing authority. The Edison Electric Institute, the national association of all investor-owned electric companies, wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that stripping the agency of its authority to regulate emissions could “lead to a deluge of tort litigation” against emitters, shifting “regulation from a sensible and consistent nationwide regime governed by EPA and the states pursuant to a statutory scheme Congress designed, to a chaotic system dictated by the interests of individual plaintiffs.”
The Supreme Court has increasingly reined in federal agencies in recent years, saying agency rules relating to issues of major economic and political significance should be invalidated unless Congress made explicitly clear it ceded that power to those executive-branch entities.
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Another victory for the Constitution.
This began when Obama couldn't get emissions laws passed. The EPA cannot enact legislation. The ruling also repeals another wrongly decided case - called "Chevron."
So, does Congress start to work together to pass laws for the American people or do they continue their partisan ways and the entire country goes into gridlock?
heh, where have you been for the last 14 years? /s
The ruling also repeals another wrongly decided case - called "Chevron.
I don't think the Court went that far, but I've only read the summary.
Either way, a very strong decision for our democratic processes.
Congress has to make the laws, it can't pass it off that responsibility.
I wouldn't have stated it that way, but I'm hoping it gives the other two branches of government notice.
They have been too busy playing political circuses.
One more win for Democracy. Democrats must be rejoicing.
Liberals are all for delegating authority to agencies- so long as those "experts" running them toe the leftist line. The second they don't it is back to the courts again. I doubt this ruling will stop the frivolous lawsuits from either side; but at least it should give the lower courts a clear guideline to kick the issue back to Congress.
We'll see if Congress gets the message. No doubt the press will characterize this ruling as a limit on executive overreach. And no doubt Democrats will cast this as some sort of national crisis. But the SCOTUS decision is really calling out Congress for not doing its job.
Congressional malingering has created a mess. And the executive branch has come to rely on courts to work around Congress with a cycle of issuing regulations followed by court challenges that results in legislating from the bench. That work around became necessary because Congress has adopted measures and practices that deliberately cause gridlock. Congress has not been fulfilling its Constitutional obligations and responsibilities.
ABC News had a special report on the rulings earlier this morning. They seemed to characterize this ruling as more a "highly partisan highly conservative" Court ruling to prevent the EPA from acting under powers previously granted by Congress and in essence called it a bad call by the Court. About what one could expect to hear from our major news organizations.
Here's hoping they overturn Scopes.