Post by brillbilly on Jul 9, 2022 23:31:42 GMT 10
On a good note..US Supreme Court Handcuffs EPA on Climate Change!
For far too long, our unelected federal administrative state has seemed to expand without end. Seizing on the most tenuous power grants from Congress, faceless functionaries have asserted more and more control over almost every aspect of our lives.
But last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sent those agencies an important message: No more.
The court’s opinion in West Virginia v. EPA caps off a long battle my state of West Virginia and many other states have waged against the EPA and its strident effort to reorder our nation’s power grid in the name of combatting climate change. In it, the court ruled that the transformational power to decide major questions like these belongs to the American people — acting through the representatives they elect, not the bureaucrats they don’t.
It all started in 2015 when EPA hijacked an obscure section of the Clean Air Act to try to dictate how the nation would produce electricity. But EPA’s self-styled “Clean Power Plan” bore the fatal flaw of a classic agency power grab: The American people, through Congress, never approved it. So, West Virginia and others took EPA to court. When the D.C. Circuit blessed (and even expanded) this overreach, the Supreme Court stepped in to have the final say. What followed was a blistering rebuke of agency overreach.
The court firmly rejected EPA’s attempt to use a “previously little-used backwater” of the Clean Air Act as a means to “force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity.” Because of EPA’s overreach, the Clean Power Plan presented one of the “extraordinary cases” in which “both separation of powers and a practical understanding of legislative intent” made the court “reluctant to read into ambiguous statutory text the delegation claimed to be lurking there.” Indeed, EPA purported to wield “newly discovered” “unprecedented power over American industry,” deciding on its own “that it would be best if coal made up a much smaller share of national electricity generation. But this effort required “comparative expertise” EPA did not have, and authority “Congress certainly has not conferred” it.
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jul/5/supreme-courts-epa-ruling-is-a-win-for-the-country/