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Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

bbc.com

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Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#561

Post by jrochkind1 »

mn3gs wrote: post #111
jrochkind1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you see a blow to the chevron deference doctrine as a good thing? I'd say that the doctrine properly tries to keep the supreme court, the least democratically responsible branch of US federal government, from being the most powerful of the three branches of government.

The least democratically responsible branch of the US federal government is the administrative state.

How do you see the Supreme Court as being more democratically responsible than the administrative personel of the executive branch?

To me, it seems clear that the "administrative state" is overseen by the president, who can overrule them and fire individual people, and the president is elected by the people every four years, and that makes the executive branch more democratically responsible than the supreme court, which is not elected by the people, and who serve for life with no democratic accountability.

But I'm open to hearing your argument for how the supreme court is more democratically responsible than the offices of the executive branch! Maybe we don't mean the same thing by "democratically responsible".

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#562

Post by throwaway09223 »

Arubis wrote: post #486
nostromo wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon This is an absurd take. All Congress needs to do is clarify that they’d like the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. That’s it. The laws regarding pollution control, many of which date back to the 1950s and 1960s, we’re not written with global warming in mind. So the court is saying the EPA needs to get permission from elected officials to regula…

> All Congress needs to do… And therein lies the problem. We know Congress is too deadlocked to be effective. Does the Court pushing back on them have a shot at getting the legislative branch to do their jobs?

"We know Congress is too deadlocked to be effective."

In areas where there's no consensus, sure. Congress is very effective when the parties align. This is government working as intended.

Not being able to bulldoze opposition is very different from existential destruction, or "becoming a non-entity" as was written above.

The government only taking actions supported by a mandate from the people is an ideal result.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#563

Post by enragedcacti »

lolinder wrote: post #492
falcolas wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, then, has no previous SC viewed its role in this way? Courts have historically always considered the intent of law (constitution) in addition to the word of law (constitution). Why isn't this one? It feels like this SC intends to use pedantry to hobble the federal government. But... why? Because they can?

Have you read the decision? I haven't read the whole thing, but it consistently talks about what Congress intended to do. Here's a relevant extract, in which the EPA itself acknowledges that to the extent Congress expressed intent, it went against the EPA's rulemaking: > EPA argued that under the major questions of doctrine, a clear statement was necessary to conclude that Congress intended to delegate authority "of…

Have you read the dissent? it has clear legal answers to the questions being asked, including how the supreme court is ruling against non-existent policy as a political statement. The EPA guidance quoted exists because the EPA decided to move in a different direction before ever applying the Clean Power Plan.

How does issuing preemptive and overly broad rulings against regulatory action that doesn't exist align with SCOTUS "just doing their job" as many people are asserting?

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#564

Post by colinmhayes »

briandear wrote: post #531
colinmhayes wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let’s amend it! Lol good luck with that. Zero chance 3/4 of the states agree on literally anything. The culture wars are in full swing, owning the other side is more important than being effective.

Good. If we can’t agree, then we shouldn’t do it. We are a republic. Every state should have a say.

Then we can’t do anything. Personally I don’t think never doing anything is a path to success.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#565

Post by citilife »

nitsky wrote: post #533
Arubis wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All Congress needs to do… And therein lies the problem. We know Congress is too deadlocked to be effective. Does the Court pushing back on them have a shot at getting the legislative branch to do their jobs?

Conservatives love deadlock, it means the federal government does less, and power remains at the local level.

To be fair, the states are effectively countries that have joined a federation (similar to the EU). The power is supposed to be primarily at the local level, the federations primary goal is collective bargaining and protection.

Pollution may make sense to regular here, but the states / federation needs to have a large majority agree (>60%). You can't have an unelected group of bureaucrats from the EPA dictating that a large number of states can't make money, for instance.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#566

Post by danenania »

fooey wrote: post #380
xxpor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to know the actual motivation: The point is to limit the administrative state and move power to congress (as you said), because federal rule making is relatively open, and the administration has experts. If it moves to congress, they'll just take the legislation lobbyists hand them and pass it, because they don't have the expertise to actually write technical regulations. This is a win for industry.

Congress doesn't remotely have the bandwidth to explicitly write out and decide all the little rules it takes to regulate the country, even if they had a clue what they were doing in each case It's pretty clearly designed to dismantle the federal regulatory apparatus

Could the same agencies that now regulate industry directly pivot to assisting congress with writing the laws?

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#567

Post by waffleiron »

nostromo wrote: post #450
asdajksah2123 wrote: post #326

It's not clear to me if the court has ruled broadly regarding delegation here (we still need experts to read through the entire ruling), but they've clearly indicated that they believe that delegation is not okay with them. Which basically means that this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon, making its functioning absolutely impossible. That may even be "constitutionally" correct (altho…

> this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon This is an absurd take. All Congress needs to do is clarify that they’d like the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. That’s it. The laws regarding pollution control, many of which date back to the 1950s and 1960s, we’re not written with global warming in mind. So the court is saying the EPA needs to get permission from elected officials to regula…

> All Congress needs to do is clarify that they’d like the EPA to regulate carbon emissions

That is one interpretation. The dissenting opinion of Kagan argues that carbon emissions are covered due to Section 111(d), as this covers all pollutants.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#568

Post by colinmhayes »

kens wrote: post #541
colinmhayes wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let’s amend it! Lol good luck with that. Zero chance 3/4 of the states agree on literally anything. The culture wars are in full swing, owning the other side is more important than being effective.

The last amendment to the constitution was in 1992, so amendments aren't impossible. The story behind the 27th amendment is pretty amusing. An undergrad student wrote a paper saying that the proposed amendment was still live and could be ratified even though it had been proposed in 1789 and not passed, but got a C grade on the paper since his TA disagreed. Annoyed by this, the student started a letter-writing campaig…

The political outlook has changed a lot since 92. Newt Gingrich was not yet speaker at that point, the republicans strategy of “never agree to anything democrats propose no matter what” was just getting started. I suspect passing that amendment would be much more difficult today.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#569

Post by throwoutway »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #326

It's not clear to me if the court has ruled broadly regarding delegation here (we still need experts to read through the entire ruling), but they've clearly indicated that they believe that delegation is not okay with them. Which basically means that this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon, making its functioning absolutely impossible. That may even be "constitutionally" correct (altho…

Lots of fear mongering here. The federal government has always been intended to have limited powers & courts have not always been pro-federal gov. That’s an unreasonable thing to posit.

What does China and Africa have to do with this? The federal government is explicitly given powers of national security & defense & diplomacy. States don’t get to have embassies or choose foreign policy.

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