In 2015, Patrick Morrisey and other state attorneys general asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to conduct a review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan. The court declined, however, concluding that the EPA’s authority extends only to promulgated rules and not to proposed ones.
The proposed rule was subsequently promulgated, however, and the battle was joined.
“The final rule . . . blatantly disregards the rule of law and will severely harm West Virginia and the U.S. economy,” Morrisey said at the time. “This rule represents the most far-reaching energy regulation in this nation’s history, drawn up by radical bureaucrats and based upon an obscure, rarely used provision of the Clean Air Act.”
Morrisey, et al. argued that the rule was illegal because it went beyond requiring power plants to install pollution technologies (as permitted by the Clean Air Act) and mandated fundamental changes in state energy policies.
“This final rule adopts a radical, unprecedented regime,” Morrisey warned, “transforming EPA from an environmental regulator into a central planning authority for electricity generation.”
Morrisey and his peers managed to prevent implementation of the proposed rule six years ago, but now this radically bad idea has reared its ugly head again and they’ve had to go back to the U.S. Supreme Court to ask it to overturn a ruling by the same DC. appeals court that would give the EPA “virtually unlimited authority to regulate wide swaths of everyday life with rules that would devastate coal mining, increase energy costs, and eliminate countless jobs.”
“This wildly expansive power to regulate factories, hospitals, and even homes has tremendous costs and consequences for all Americans, in particular West Virginia’s coal miners, pipeliners, natural gas producers, and utility workers,” Morrisey predicted. “If EPA lacks such expansive authority, as we argue, the Supreme Court should make that clear now.”
So it should. Better yet, Congress could reassert itself, eliminate the EPA altogether, and put a permanent end to the continuing usurpations.