One would think that pollution that crosses state lines would be subject to Federal regulation under the commerce clause.
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Didn’t we do this once with Acid Rain and the Northeast? Things got better here.
JimA
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The 4 women on the Supreme Court know that healthy air makes healthy people. The 5 men on the Supreme Court are total buffons!
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It is. That’s not why SCOTUS ruled against the EPA.
The opinion is linked below. Here’s a quick summary of the dispute:
The CAA requires states to control their pollution that crosses state lines. The way the Act is set up, states are required to come up with their own plan (a “State Implementation Plan,” or SIP). Only if they don’t do that - or don’t come up with one that meets the Act requirements - EPA can step in and impose a Federal Implementation Plan for such state or states (an FIP).
EPA revised their standards for ozone, requiring every state to adopted a new good neighbor SIP. EPA disapproved about 20 of them, which disapprovals were challenged. EPA adopted a single collective FIP for all 20 states, and the technical analysis for the requirements in the FIP were based on the assumption that all 20 states would be subject to the FIP. Several states objected to that, arguing that some (if not many) of the SIP’s would ultimately be found valid, dropping those states out of the FIP. That’s what ended up happening, with disapproval of 12 of the SIP’s being stayed by federal courts by the time this case hit SCOTUS.
The states argued that it was arbitrary and capricious for EPA to try to implement the FIP grounded on technical analysis based on 20 states, when it wouldn’t actually have 20 states in it. SCOTUS agreed.
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Letter of the law vs spirit of the law. The more people focus on the letter of the law, the more I know they are crooked.
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Ain’t that the truth
Buffoons
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Only 3/5 of the time.
Always appreciate your comments. Do you see this impacting the “bad stuff drifting over state borders” or is this really just a meaningless decision that will have little actual impact on controlling the pollution?
JimA
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Perhaps, but the question of how the case should be decided did not involve resolving any interstate commerce clause issues. No one disputed that these emissions were properly subject to Congressional regulation, or even that the EPA had the general authority to impose an FIP. It was just a dispute over how the EPA was to do that.
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thanks albaby1, for the concise and crucial real news summary.
And what JimA said.
d fb
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I think it will have modest actual impact. This ruling was about whether the specific FIP that was adopted by EPA was arbitrary or not to continue implementing after so many of the states dropped out. Having to update their FIP’s to more closely reflect how many states will actually be governed by it might require some additional effort by EPA, but this isn’t really a groundbreaking precedent that will have a whole lot of impact. The fish inspection case is much more important.
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Thanks. There are reasons I was not a lawyer. So, courts stayed disapproval of some of the State plans, meaning, as I understand it, the disapproval was not overruled, but was suspended, without a final judgement on the validity of the disapproval. So some states argued, based on a stay of the disapproval, not an invalidation of the disapproval, of some SIPs, that the Federal plan should be stayed, even for the states whose SIP has not been disapproved, or had not had a court issue a stay of the disapproval of their SIP?..I wrote that, read it over three times, and I’m still not sure I grasp it.
Steve
No, you got it right. I think the key point is that the EPA plan can’t be “arbitrary or capricious,” which is legalese for having to be based on a rational application of the law to facts.
The challengers argued that whether the EPA’s FIP made any sense depended on how many states would be subject to it. EPA analyzed the standards they would impose based on the assumption that every “upwind” state whose SIP was rejected would be part of the FIP. But a dozen of those rejections were stayed - meaning that the lower courts had found that the challengers were pretty likely to prevail against EPA, even though they hadn’t reached a final judgment. Thus, SCOTUS found it was pretty likely that the challengers in this suit would prevail - if most of the states dropped out, then EPA’s rule wouldn’t make sense, and most of the states had been found to be pretty likely to drop out, so the challengers were pretty likely to be correct in saying the rule didn’t make sense.
Note that the dissent disagreed with all of the above - including disagreeing with the majority’s finding that the FIP depended at all on how many states (or which states) participated in it.
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In other words the EPA will continue to pursue regulation of downwind pollution by toxic and harmful emissions to human health. The EPA will continue to chip away at the polluters until they all cave.
Not when Project 2025 is implemented.
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Why do you even think Project 2025 is even viable?
I view this decision by the court as perfectly in tune with the other case tossing out deference to regulatory agencies. This ruling will have an identical impact as the other ruling. As you summarized it, this case involved procedures a FEDERAL agency is allowed to use when attempting to impose or enforce regulations across the 50 states. In this case, the agency was the EPA and the issue involved was pollution. The EPA attempted to delegate initial responsibility for establishing new ozone compliance programs to each state, subject to an expectation the NET result of all 50 programs would add to achieve result X. When all 50 states submitted their proposals, 20 of the 50 fell short of the EPA’s mandate and those 20 states sued to prevent or delay the EPA from forcing them to alter their plan. Sine the EPA has a federal responsibiity, it devised a new plan that, when applied across the TWENTY outliers, would result in achieveing the EPA’s national mandate across all FIFTY states. These 20 states sued, stating that approach was “arbitrary and capricious” and now the USSC has agreed.
What this ruling states, is that when attempting to comply with national mandates for some measurable result X of some performance criteria, be it pollution, educational attainment, etc., the right of inividual states to individually argue against requirements imposed at a national level or requirements to contribute to meeting that national criteria supersede the federal agency’s regulatory responsibiity to meet criteria and authority to direct HOW those criteria are met.
In other words, this ruling again limits the ability of federal agencies to implement federally legislated mandates by allowing individual states to insert years of litigation into the timeline at the behest of special interests who may have undue influence at a state level. Such rulings are magnifying the ability of businesses involved with pollution or similar “tragedy of the commons” dynamics (where local exploitation of a resource benefitting a small minority creates harmful impacts on a much larger pool of citizens) to fight and delay any measures to correct those problems. This is exactly why FEDERAL regulatory authority is required to have national priorities that hopefully reflect a more rational use of said resources counterbalance state or regional abuses.
It’s bitterly ironic that the court would claim a federal agency is being “arbitrary and capricious” when attempting to provide meaningful enforcement of NATIONAL environmental laws. It seems the ability to be arbitrary and capricious is a right the United States Supreme Court holds to itself, when ignorning ANY precedent and ANY informed understanding of the intended and appropriate balance of power between the federal government, the states and private industry in coming up with its rulings.
Couple these rulings with a looming world where civil service protections could be decimated and actual scientific and legal professionals could be chased out of state government for partisan reasons to allow states to countersue ANY attempts at environmental protections and Americans will be facing problems with Love Canal or Flint level consequences within months.
WTH
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Exactly! The Supreme Court is taking on the role of Congress and the Regulatory Agencies.
Because all it takes is a 6-3 (or even a 5-4) SCOTUS to say it is?
Pillar #2 is already well underway:
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
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Except the power does not go to “We The People”. It goes to the state (L&Ses) that may hold their seats thanks to a gerrymander, rather than a clear majority vote of the people. As noted before, Michigan’s legislature was controlled by one faction for forty years, until redistricting was taking out of their hands. Under the new districts, control of both houses flipped to the other faction, with narrow majorities, which more accurately reflects the vote of the “people” for statewide offices. Meanwhile, we see other states where the Gov is threatening to remove local elected officials who don’t toe his line, and overrule local ordinances, passed by local elected officials, that he doesn’t like.
Steve
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