Which leaves one more major case to be decided in this term. And it could be a blockbuster, giving yet another part of the conservative coalition a long-sought victory., will likely come down later this week.
designed and executed by three groups: Republican politicians, conservative activists and Republican-appointed judges. The result is nothing less than a revolution.is nominally about an extended back-and-forth over the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules adopted during the Obama administration. But the larger issue the case addresses is how much authority an agency such as the EPA has to regulate — in this instance, how much it can regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that worsen climate change.
The CPP never actually went into effect. It was halted by the courts, then the Trump administration abandoned it, then the Biden administration declined to bring it back. But the justices still chose to take this case even though the central question is moot. That’s likely because the conservatives on the court are eager to redefine the authority of the EPA and the federal government more generally. One vehicle they’re using is the “major questions doctrine,” which says it’s fine for agencies to decide minor questions about how a law should be implemented, but if there’s something really consequential, an agency can’t go where Congress hasn’t specifically and explicitly ordered it.
We don’t yet know how far they’ll go in this case. But it has to be understood in the context of a Congress that has been rendered almost completely incapable of passing ambitious legislation,It’s nearly impossible to imagine Congress passing something like the Clean Air Act or even the Affordable Care Act today, since the country is closely divided and Republicans have so effectively engineered minority rule that allows them to stop nearly everything they don’t like.
They've caught the tiger by the tail, bless their hearts. Now your tax dollars can go to the local madrasa and kids can put up druid shrines and pentagrams at football games.