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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

#631

Post by dfxm12 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #404
rayiner wrote: post #306

Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority ov…

So the EPA is kneecapped since they have to go through the most ineffective and hyper partisan congress since the founding of the country.

That's the strategy of the Federalist Society, make rulings via the undemocratic SCOTUS under the guise of giving states/congress power, but then also making sure that state elections are undemocratic via gerrymandering, voting laws, etc.

It doesn't help that taking action on matters of national importance is inherently difficult in a Federalist government.

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

#632

Post by extheat »

camgunz wrote: post #254
xthrowawayxx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a good thing that laws can't pass without sufficient consensus. If you can bypass consensus for the greater good then so can the other side.

The problem is that our federal legislative system is heavily tilted in favor of Republicans despite them being firmly a minority party. This is most apparent in the Senate, but gerrymandering gives them an edge in the House too. So when you're talking about consensus, the country has it. There's consensus on immigration, gun control, and abortion. It's just that Republicans prevent us from acting on it.

Consensus doesn’t just mean 51%. It means general agreement. If you have 100 people in a room, 51 people are in favor of something and the other 49 are not, is that your “consensus”? Prior to the US each of the states were their own sovereign entities. Why enter the US (or stay in it) if you are going to be ruled against your will? The states agreed to give up some of their power and joined under the explicit conditions of the senate that they would have an equal say.

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

#633

Post by xyzzyz »

voisin wrote: post #182
elmerfud wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree it will be chaos. Congress has for far too long abdicated what it is supposed to be directly responsible for to unelected bureaucrats that exist in agencies that are overseen by the executive branch of government. Congress is now free to focused on creating chaos between the people that elect them. When is the last time you've seen anyone from Congress campaign on any substantive issue? I've not seen it…

Many of those unelected bureaucrats are experts in their fields due to their ability to focus for entire careers.

No post body was provided.

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

#634

Post by AnimalMuppet »

namdnay wrote: post #539
kbuchanan wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great example of how on an individual level commentators want to bend democratic processes to achieve their own goals, but, without fail, they get caught in a tangle of contradictions. What is the Supreme Court's mandate? To stop climate change? To feel out the majority's opinion and make a legal path for it? This is why democracy is so hard: it consistently yields outcomes that are disappointing to a large…

> What is the Supreme Court's mandate? To stop climate change? Stopping climate change should be everyone’s mandate. When your house is on fire and a neighbor has a hose pipe, so you get into an argument with them because they’re not a fireman?

No. No. Wrong. The Supreme Court's mandate is to be the Supreme Court, not to be the solve-the-current-crisis fixer. I want the planet not to fry and to still have a constitutional democracy at the end of that process.

The problem is that people want to handle this "on the cheap", by executive order, rather than by the actual existing mechanism, which is through Congress. Yes, Congress created the EPA. They didn't give them the authority to regulate CO2, though. That was an overreach when the executive order came out, and that reality finally caught up legally.

You want to regulate CO2? Then do it the right way - by having Congress pass a bill that grants that power to the EPA. That's the difference between rule of law and rule of the president.

You say those states have too much power? No they don't. There's only 18 of them. That's only 36 senators. They don't have a majority of the House, either. So go do it the way it should have been done from the beginning, instead of trying to get away with using a lazy back door.

[Edit: Reading other posts here, the issue may not have been CO2 emission, but rather management of the electrical grid. I still think that CO2 was a massive over-reach when the EPA started regulating that. It was almost certainly beyond the scope that Congress conceived of when they created the EPA.]

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

#635

Post by lolinder »

LargeWu wrote: post #619
lolinder wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make OP's point less true: the headlines surrounding this decision are misleading. This is not judicial overreach, it's an application of a different theory of judicial review than we've become accustomed to, and it's not necessarily a bad one. If we don't like it when the police creatively interpret laws to target minorities, can we allow the EPA the authority to creatively interpret laws to target foss…

"A different theory of legal review" which here means coming to a predetermined policy decision, and then inventing legal justification for it, no matter how flimsy.

I've had plenty of educated, well-informed individuals make exactly the same legal arguments to me for decades. Whether or not I agree with the reasoning, it's not hard for me to believe that the Supreme Court justices believed the principles they're following long before they arrived at this decision.

You can disagree with the legal justification, but that you disagree is not evidence that it was invented to achieve a specific goal.

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

#636

Post by kmeisthax »

politician wrote: post #607
Workaccount2 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the EPA is kneecapped since they have to go through the most ineffective and hyper partisan congress since the founding of the country.

And yet, fixing that problem -- the problem of the ineffectiveness and hyper-partisanship of Congress -- would have so many positive effects for all of our lives regardless of our ideological perspectives that it should be our number one priority as the electorate.

The ineffectiveness and hyperpartisanship of Congress is directly attributable to the ideological perspectives of the electorate.

Also, Congress is not as ineffective and hyperpartisan as you think. It's only on issues that have public attention that they act this way. When nobody is looking they move quickly and decisively.

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

#637

Post by throwaway4aday »

equalsione wrote: post #227
cloutchaser wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Over 60% of the US population think abortion should be legal. More than half of US states are (or are very likely) to institute abortion bans. To the broader point, there has to be _representative_ democracy for decentralized decision making to be fair - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/nov/...

> there has to be _representative_ democracy for decentralized decision making to be fair

So fix the actual problem instead of trying to kludge your way around it.

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

#638

Post by JauntTrooper »

politician wrote: post #607
Workaccount2 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the EPA is kneecapped since they have to go through the most ineffective and hyper partisan congress since the founding of the country.

And yet, fixing that problem -- the problem of the ineffectiveness and hyper-partisanship of Congress -- would have so many positive effects for all of our lives regardless of our ideological perspectives that it should be our number one priority as the electorate.

Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would go a long way.

Less than 10% of congressional districts this year will be competitive (defined as the most recent presidential election margin was within 10 percentage points). Only 41 seats!

I haven’t really seen a realistic plan to do it though.

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

#639

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #306

Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority ov…

[deleted]

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

#640

Post by themaninthedark »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #404
rayiner wrote: post #306

Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority ov…

So the EPA is kneecapped since they have to go through the most ineffective and hyper partisan congress since the founding of the country.

The EPA is under the executive branch, they should not "have to go through congress" for anything. That is entirely out of their scope of operation.

They are supposed to be enforcing and upholding the laws that congress enacts.

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