One more blockbuster Supreme Court decision could still be coming even after Friday's

[Achilles]

One more blockbuster Supreme Court decision could still be coming even after Friday's abortion ruling

Supreme Court's abortion ruling rocked nation last week but West Virginia v. EPA could also be huge

By Liz Peek | Fox News


Believe it or not, overturning Roe v. Wade may not be the Supreme Court’s most dramatic decision this year. Instead, its ruling on West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency could prove far more consequential. It could literally upend how our government works.

For the better.

West Virginia vs. the EPA asks whether important policies that impact the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected D.C. bureaucrats or by Congress. This SCOTUS could well decide that ruling by executive agency fiat is no longer acceptable.

The case involves the Clean Power Plan, which was adopted under President Barack Obama to fight climate change; the program was estimated to cost as much as $33 billion per year and would have completely reordered our nation’s power grid. The state of West Virginia, joined by two coal companies and others, sued the EPA, arguing the plan was an abuse of power.


Former President Barack Obama speaks during a memorial service for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the Smith Center in Las Vegas, Jan. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/John Locher)

By deciding in favor of West Virginia, the court could begin to rein in the vast powers of the alphabet agencies in D.C. that run our lives and return it to legislators whom we elect to create…legislation. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion laws are more appropriately left up to the people’s elected representatives, it may decide in West Virginia vs. EPA that Congress, and not federal agencies, should write our laws.

A decision that puts Congress in charge would stall environmental rules intended to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Legislators, back in the driver’s seat, would have to debate and go public with the consequences – and costs -- of regulations that are now adopted with little buy-in from the public.

To further their climate agenda, Democrats have been able to hide the full-in price tag of abandoning oil and gas as our main energy sources by creating tax subsidies for renewables. If consumers had to pay the real cost of wind and solar power, they might not be so enthusiastic about what President Joe Biden calls the great "transition."

But the case goes beyond environmental regulations.


Members of the Supreme Court pose for their group photo in Washington, April 23, 2021. They are, seated from left, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, and standing from left, Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool, File)

A ruling in favor of West Virginia would reverse a decades-long trend in which Congress has handed off to federal agencies decisions our legislators refuse or are unable to make. The usurping of authority by D.C. bureaucracies began with the New Deal in the 1930s, when an ambitious President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the way by creating the TVA, the WPA and a total of 69 other offices and executive branch agencies to do his bidding. The process occasioned Democrat Al Smith to complain that he was "submerged in a bowl of alphabet soup."

Restricting the power of the alphabet soup authorities might require that our representatives and senators actually do their jobs, allowing less time for posturing and passing pointless dead-on-arrival bills. They might have to show up more than half the days in the year, for instance, which is the current norm.

It could, for sure, derail the ambitions of Joe Biden, who won no significant majority in Congress and appears incapable of "working across the aisle," though as Candidate Biden, he argued that ability was one of his strongest credentials.



In addition to broad environmental rules that might come under new scrutiny, subsequent suits might challenge labor laws written by the NLRB, consumer protection edicts from the CFPB, and regulations put in place by the FDA, the CDC and the entire host of agencies that have immense – many would say excess – power over our lives.

But initially, the ruling would deep-six the Biden administration’s ambition to kill off the coal industry, which is why West Virginia, our nation’s second biggest coal-mining state after Wyoming, brought the suit, along with Westmoreland Mining Holdings, North American Coal Corporation and others.

Like Obama, Biden wants to effectively shut down our fossil fuel industries that provide cheap, plentiful and reliable energy and that are the envy of the world. His "Build Back Better" plan incorporated $550 billion in programs aimed at curtailing emissions, including significant portions of Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal.


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is joined on stage by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Climate Crisis Summit at Drake University on Nov. 9, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Obama’s approach was to reinterpret the 1970 Clean Air Act to allow a nationwide cap-and-trade regimen, requiring power plants to offset emissions by investing in other low-carbon facilities. Congress did not alter the Clean Air Act language to permit the Clean Power Plan; the Obama White House simply grabbed it as a way to further their climate ambitions.

The courts decided the CPP constituted executive overreach and put the plan on hold. Subsequently, the Trump White House rescinded the program.

This back-and-forth highlights an obvious problem with government by alphabet soup. Successive administrations can easily change the rules by which such agencies operate. Policymaking ; therefore, is erratic and inconsistent. Especially in the power arena, where new facilities can take years to build and the impact on the general population can be profound, this is a costly and inefficient way to govern.


A man rids his bike by giant wind turbines on March 27, 2013, in Palm Springs, California. (Getty Images)

Political parties rise and fall, to be sure, and can also change the nation’s direction. But matters of consequence should be argued in the public forum and not buried under the almost 100,000 pages of new rules and regulations published during Obama’s last year in office, for instance.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote in a decision, "We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance." That limiting guidance appears to have support from the conservative justices on the court today.

If the court launches a widespread curtailment of governing by executive agency, as it should, we will see more protests and renewed cries to "Pack the Court," including from members of Congress. After all, they’ll have to get to work.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/one-...ion-ruling.amp

[Bear]

In Landmark Ruling, Supreme Court Deals Massive Blow To Biden's Climate Change Agenda

BY TYLER DURDEN
THURSDAY, JUN 30, 2022 - 11:20 AM

At the same time as it give the Biden admin a token victory by overturning Trump's "remain in Mexico" rule, the US Supreme Court also struck a major blow to Biden's fight against climate change, when in a landmark ruling, the SCOTUS also curbed the ability of America’s top environmental regulator to limit greenhouse gas emissions, siding with coal miners and Republican-led states.

In a majority opinion authored by chief justice John Roberts, the justices ruled that in the latest example of Democratic overreach, the Environmental Protection Agency was not specifically authorized by Congress to reduce carbon emissions when it was set up in 1970. The ruling leaves the Biden administration dependent on passing legislation if it wants to implement sweeping regulations to curb emissions.

The opinion from the court's conservative majority said that “a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body”. The justices added they doubted Congress intended to delegate the question of “how much coal-based generation there should be over the coming decades, to any administrative agency”.

The dissenting opinion authored by justice Elena Kagan and joined by the court’s other two liberal justices said the EPA had the authority to regulate “stationary sources” of polluting substances that are harmful to the public, adding that curbing the output of greenhouse gas emissions was “a necessary part of any effective approach for addressing climate change”. In other words, the usual green tripe that has sent the country to the edge of a hyperinflationary commodity disaster.

“This Court has obstructed EPA’s effort from the beginning,” Kagan wrote. “The limits the majority now puts on EPA’s authority fly in the face of the statute Congress wrote.”
As the FT reports, at the heart of the case is a disagreement over how broadly the EPA should be allowed to interpret portions of the 1970 Clean Air Act, particularly the sections that direct the EPA to develop emissions limitations for power plants.

Dubbed West Virginia vs EPA, the case was brought by a host of Republican attorneys-general and the coal industry. Their argument centres on a regulation that never took effect: an Obama-era proposal known as the Clean Power Plan, which would have mandated that power plants make 32 per cent reductions in emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. The Supreme Court ordered that rule to be suspended in 2016.
That rule was later torn up by the Trump administration in favor of its Affordable Clean Energy rule, designed to support the coal industry. The Trump administration’s regulation, however, was struck down by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last year.
Challenging the lower court’s reversal of Trump’s rule at the Supreme Court, West Virginia has argued that the Obama-era Clean Power Plan relied on an overly broad interpretation of the Clean Air Act and gave the EPA excessive and “industry transforming” power.
West Virginia argued that the lower court’s interpretation of the law granted the EPA “unbridled power” to issue significant rules that would reshape the US electricity grid and decarbonise sectors of the economy. It said the EPA should only have very limited authority to regulate emissions inside “the fence line” of power plants, and cannot apply broader industry-wide measures like carbon credit trading or biomass co-firing.

Defending the case, Biden’s EPA has said that nothing in the Clean Air Act makes a distinction between inside the fence line measures and broader, industry-wide regulatory measures. It added that West Virginia’s “real concern” was that the agency might introduce some elements of Obama’s Clean Power Plan into a future rule. But the EPA said that the Supreme Court is not authorised to issue an advisory opinion on the types of measures a future rule could contain.

Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip in the Senate, predictably said the decision was “a dangerous step backwards and threatens our air and our planet”, adding it “sets a troubling precedent both for what it means to protect public health and the authority regulatory agencies have to protect public health”.

What he means is that the US may once again be on the path to becoming self-sufficient in energy, and not peddling money to corrupt "green" lobbies and interests.

The ruling by the court’s conservative majority is the latest in a string of dramatic decisions that have challenged established legal precedents, including the recent reversal of Roe vs Wade. Last week, it also struck down a century-old New York state law requiring an individual to show “proper cause” to carry a concealed gun in public, deeming the statute unconstitutional. The court on Monday also ruled in favour of a former high school coach dismissed for praying at football games, fuelling the fraught debate on the separation of church and state.



https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/la...-change-agenda

[merovingian]

I wonder how this will affect the BATFE's nearly non-stop administrative "rule making", in light of the fact that every rule they "make" is a violation of the Constitution's 2nd Amendment.