July 1, 2022

Supreme Court Reins in the Bureaucracy

The EPA overstepped its regulatory authority when it unilaterally expanded its power over business without Congress’s consent.

The 2021-2022 term of the U.S. Supreme Court will long be remembered primarily for its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the infamous Roe v. Wade ruling. However, the down-ticket cases also featured some rather significant decisions. In fact, we could sum up the term as one marked by a commitment to constitutional fidelity — much more so than the nation has enjoyed from the Court in recent memory.

One of the Court’s last decisions of the term proved to be a big win against the seemingly ever-encroaching power of unelected government bureaucrats. In West Virginia v. EPA, the justices handed down a 6-3 decision that directly rebuked the power-grabbing apparatus of the executive branch via its various agencies, in this case the Environmental Protection Agency.

Using the Clean Air Act, the EPA, beginning during the Obama administration, developed increasingly onerous and expansive regulatory powers so as to effectively gain control over the nation’s energy businesses. Barack Obama’s EPA, using the Clean Air Act of 2014, developed the Clean Power Plan, which effectively targeted America’s coal industry for elimination. Under Joe Biden, the EPA has followed suit by using the Clean Power Plan to target the broader fossil fuel industry. Of course, all of these anti-fossil fuel actions have been justified and carried out under the dubious claim of combating climate change.

West Virginia sued, contending that the EPA was overstepping its regulatory authority, and the Court agreed. “Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible solution to the crisis of the day,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme. A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation.”

Roberts further observed, “We also find it ‘highly unlikely that Congress would leave’ to ‘agency discretion’ the decision of how much coal-based generation there should be over the coming decades.”

The ruling is a long-deserved rebuke of the bureaucratic state. Indeed, by some measure it is the development of Washington’s unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic state that led to the election of Donald Trump. Americans were (and still are) tired of elites in DC making decisions about every facet of our lives without any elected officials being directly involved in the process. In fact, the source of the great divide between the Left and the Right in the nation today can in many ways be laid at the feet of the unelected bureaucratic state. Those on the Left have almost entirely eschewed the idea of democratic values in favor of whatever ensures the furtherance of their political/social agenda.