Very likely this case is decided this week
Robert Meyers, a partner at Crowell & Moring LLC and former acting EPA assistant administrator under President George W. Bush, said a Supreme Court decision invoking the nondelegation or major questions doctrines wouldn’t instantaneously change the way the federal regulatory apparatus works.
But, he said, it might spur Congress to legislate more specifically in the future. And while that would be difficult and take time, it might not be impossible.
“Congress would have to change,” said Meyers, who as a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee worked on the 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act.
“Congress has institutional imperative to be relevant,” he said. “And if the courts are overturning their laws, because they’re too vague, over time I would expect Congress would adapt, too, institutionally. I think they wouldn’t assign themselves any more irrelevancy than they had to.”
Good article that really spells it out, tl;dr the Supreme Court is probably going to dissolve all regulatory power of the executive because Congress is supposed to make laws and the Executive is just supposed to enforce them.
This is hilarious, they’re going to bring the country to it’s knees by putting the onus on Congress to write hundreds of pages of regulations for every minor detail that the usual agencies crank out with the help of experts who’ve built their entire careers on regulating one little policy or another.
Probably lol, and worst part is you know Biden would roll over and say it’s out of his hands to do anything since he doesn’t want to rock the boat.
The Clean Air Act was written to allow EPA to regulate new pollutants for new problems — as long as they meet a statutory threshold of endangering public health and welfare. In 2009, EPA made such a finding for six greenhouse gases. It still underpins regulations for motor vehicles and other sources of climate pollution — including the power plant rule at stake in West Virginia vs. EPA.
If the agency had to wait for Congress to act on climate change — such as might occur under the major questions doctrine — it would almost certainly still be waiting. In 2009, the House passed a major climate law for the first time, but it never received a vote in the Senate.
Hashing out the nitty-gritty of rulemakings in Congress would likely exacerbate the legislative gridlock that exists today, not lessen it, said Xan Fishman, director of energy policy and carbon management at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“The more details you have to come to an agreement on, the harder it is to come to agreement,” he said. “And sometimes it’s easier to forge a bipartisan agreement and leave some of the details to the administration to figure out. That’s always kind of a gamble as to what the next administration is going to be, or who’s actually making those regulations. But you know, in a bipartisan deal in Congress, you just kind of live with that.”
Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — the section of law that the West Virginia case is concerned with — runs approximately 300 words. But the final Clean Power Plan was 304 pages long, while the Trump-era replacement was 68 pages. Both are stocked with potentially controversial details that might have stymied agreement among lawmakers.
IANAL but one part of Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act is basically saying states need to submit plans which do things like establish standards of performance for existing source of air pollution in circumstances where standards don’t exist already. Or something like that. There’s nothing quantitative, it really is just 300 words, starting with “The EPA shall prescribe regulations…” and the article OP linked seems to imply that the SC is going to say that Congress should actually be doing the regulations, in all the gory details that agencies like the EPA does. So yeah I could definitely see how this would bring the government to a standstill by totally overloading Congress with every regulatory duty that’s been delegated to every agency in the Executive.
Probably lol, and worst part is you know Biden would roll over and say it’s out of his hands to do anything since he doesn’t want to rock the boat.
Not only is the boat already rocking, it!s getting dangerously close to capsizing.
It won’t bring anything to a standstill because they don’t want to actually do anything and nobody can force them to. Any regulations not already in existence will never made. Those that do exist are going to be removed sometimes. If this happens I’m simply not going to trust any product that wasn’t already in the market because it won’t be tested.
Couldn’t that just force us to adopt a more parliamentary system where Congress appoints the leaders of the federal agencies instead of the president?
