The Supreme Court once again saved the American public from rampant left-wing control of every branch of government in their latest EPA ruling.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plant’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The 6-3 ruling delivers a blow to Democrats and environmental groups, who want the agency to crack down on emissions from power plants and other sources to mitigate climate change.
“The only question before the Court is more narrow: whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act,” the majority opinion read. “For the reasons given, the answer is no.”
Chief Justice John Roberts drafted the opinion and the court’s other five conservatives concurred, while its three liberals dissented.
The case in question, West Virginia v. EPA, stems from a petition from a mix of coal-producing states and coal companies that asked the high court justices to establish whether the Clean Air Act, one of the nation’s most influential environmental laws, gives the agency broad authority to restrict power plant emissions.
The decision to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate power plant emissions constrains the agency’s ability to act on Joe Biden’s fascistic agenda to slow climate change and get the ball rolling on his target of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035.
Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion said the court “strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”
To what extent Congress gave the EPA the authority under the Clean Air Act to respond to climate change, as the Obama-era Clean Power Plan sought to do, was at the center of the case.
Roberts’s opinion invoked the “major questions doctrine” to hold that the Clean Air Act does not allow the EPA to impose carbon emission caps by mandating a shift in energy generation to cleaner resources.
The major questions doctrine is based on the idea that if Congress wants to offer an administrative agency the power to make “decisions of vast economic and political significance,” it must say so explicitly.
Liberals are once again up in arms after Thursday’s SCOTUS ruling but they fail to recognize a key point that every American should in fact be celebrating.
The ruling in and of itself is not about climate change; it’s unfortunate that it’s been slapped with that label. It’s actually about maintaining the separation of powers put forth in the U.S. Constitution.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, whose state was the case’s lead petitioner, cheered the decision.
Author: Elizabeth Tierney
