The Post & Email by Paul Driessen 9/3/2022
They raise energy prices, hurt living standards, and impair our future as a law-abiding nation The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in is truly a landmark ruling. It decisively rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to use vague, “previously little-used” language in the Clean Air Act to shutter America’s remaining coal-fired power plants and force the nation to switch to pseudo-renewable energy, in the name of ending the “manmade climate crisis.”
But the decision goes much further. The Court made it clear that federal agenciesmay not impose “major federal actions,” decide “major questions” or implement “transformative expansions” of their regulatory authority without specific statutory authority clearly conferred by Congress.
In other words, federal agencies do not have the power or right to take unilateral actions that effectively transform or undermine major sections of America’s energy, economic or agricultural systems, its industries or its living standards, unless Congress has given them explicit authority to do so.
Such enormously “transformational powers” belong to the American people, acting through legislators they elect to represent them – not to bureaucrats who are not elected and cannot easily be removed from office or otherwise disciplined and held accountable. The intolerable regulatory overreach exhibited by EPA (and too many other federal agencies) violates our Constitution, its “separation of powers” doctrine, and any rational understanding of “legislative intent.”
Many Americans believe West Virginia v. EPA represents a great victory over the regulatory “Deep State.” However, the Court’s ruling will mean little if the Biden Administration refuses to acknowledge the decision and continues doing as it pleases, perhaps reflecting the “progressive” view that
To cite just one example, consider what’s happening with regard to pipeline policy – yet another choke point the Administration is utilizing to force America to terminate fossil fuel use.
Richard Glick, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s radically left chairman, claims the ruling doesn’t apply to him. He insists that several federal district courts – two tiers below the Supreme Court – previously held that the EPA could regulate coal into oblivion. Therefore, he claims, the energy-killing regulations he wants to impose on pipelines can remain in place, or even be made more onerous, unless the Supreme Court specifically overrules him and FERC on that specific matter.
Under this “novel” interpretation, federal agencies can ignore or defy the Supreme Court on any regulations they want to implement – even regulations with major national implications, even rules that could leave people freezing jobless in the dark and perhaps dying from hypothermia – unless and until the Supremes render a decision specifically against those agencies and rules.
More:
https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/09/03/biden-energy-policies-incoherent-incompetent-intolerable/
