It seems overturning Roe v. Wade may not be the biggest decision to come down from the Supreme Court as its ruling on West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency could strip the government and alphabet agencies of their unfettered powers.
The case asks whether pressing policies that have an impact on the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected bureaucrats or by Congress. The ruling could decide that governing by executive agency fiat is unconstitutional, according to Fox News.
The case takes direct aim at President Biden’s climate agenda and involves the Clean Power Plan. That plan was put in place under former President Barack Obama in his efforts to combat climate change. If the plan had been implemented it would have cost roughly $33 billion per year and reordered the nation’s power grid. Two coal companies and the state of West Virginia sued the EPA alleging the plan was an abuse of power.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is the primary plaintiff and is joined by Republican attorneys general from more than a dozen other states, as well as the two coal companies which are also being represented by Morrissey’s office.
If the high court decides in West Virginia’s favor, that could throw a wrench into the powers of the alphabet agencies in D.C. The power to decide important issues that affect all Americans would be returned to the legislators who are elected. In other words, the power to make such decisions would be returned to the states just as the abortion decision was. Federal agencies would no longer be empowered to write our laws.
If Congress were put in charge, environmental rules intended to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy would be stalled. Climate change would be debated by legislators publicly and the actual cost of proposed regulations would be revealed.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of West Virginia, it will save the coal industry. Westmoreland Mining Holdings, North American Coal Corporation, and others will win a huge victory and it will be a death knell for Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda.
Democrats have buried the actual costs of abandoning oil and gas in favor of their green agenda. Once consumers see what wind and solar power actually cost, they are likely to balk at the whole inane concept that Biden calls the “Great Transition.”
The ruling would not only affect environmental regulations, it would severely smack the hands of federal agencies when making decisions. The mess engendered by alphabet agencies started in the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. That created a whopping 69 offices and executive branch agencies that have since meddled in every aspect of Americans’ lives.
Taking the power away from those agencies and returning it to the states would streamline politics so that things would get done on a local level rather than bogged down at the federal one.
Agencies such as the FDA, CDC, and a whole raft of other bureaucracies could find themselves not only severely limited in scope and power, but the subject of numerous lawsuits such as ones that challenge labor laws, consumer protection mandates, and edicts by the EPA.
Before his untimely death, the legendary originalist Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a decision, “We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
Conservative justices on the court today appear to be in agreement with that sentiment.
This refers to what is known as the “major questions” doctrine — the premise that if Congress intended agencies to make sweeping, economy wide changes with their regulations, the relevant legislation must say so specifically and clearly.