Environmental activists rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 after it ruled against the Obama administration's plan to cut climate-warming emissions at the nation's power plants. The Supreme Court has since further limited the power of federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.
The president has the power to nominate federal judges for lifelong terms. Not only to the Supreme Court, but also to federal appellate and district courts, which seeof cases each year. Pending Senate approval, those appointments shape the country’s judiciary and the government’s ability to implement laws for decades.People cool off in misters along the Las Vegas Strip during a deadly, record-breaking heatwave.
In other words, if a law like the Clean Air Act isn’t crystal clear, the courts would defer to experts and scientists at federal agencies, like the EPA, to fill in the gaps when writing regulation and implementing laws.deference in a ruling on two related cases. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.
Agency attorneys “are acting like anybody else’s attorneys,” said Damien Schiff, a senior attorney focused on environmental law at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public interest law group. “They’re just simply advocates articulating a view, but it’s not necessarily privileged in terms of its accuracy or propriety just because it’s being articulated by a government agency.
Biden has had less say on the makeup of the Supreme Court, filling only one opening during his first term — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — and legal experts say it’s unlikely he’d be able to shift it in a second term. The court’s two oldest justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are both conservative and unlikely to retire if Biden is reelected.