Supreme Court Digs into Statutory Details More than Standing or Nondelegation in West Virginia v. EPA
Today the Supreme Court heard oral argument in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the most important environmental law case the Supreme Court is hearing this term. While some warned this case could be a Waterloo for the administrative state, most of the oral argument focused narrowly on how to interpret the relevant provisions of the Clean Air Act — at least that is my preliminary reaction to today’s argument.
The focus of the case is the scope of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases from the power sector. This matters because power plants are responsible for nearly a third of domestic greenhouse gas emissions. In advance of the case, many have raised concerns that the case could have broader impacts on federal agency regulation, particularly if the Court relies upon the major questions doctrine or nondelegation concerns to narrow the scope of the agency’s authority. I previewed the case here (and in the posts linked therein).
Over the two-plus hours of argument, the justices seemed most interested in how to interpret the language of Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. Section 7411), which is the statutory source of authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan embodied a broad view of this language, that would justify regulating emissions on a system-wide basis, so as to induce fuel shifting and generation shifting. The petitioner states and coal companies, on the other hand, prefer the narrower reading adopted by the Trump Administration, under which Section 111 only allows the imposition of requirements at individual plants. As Section 111 refers to both the “best system of emission reduction” and the imposition of controls at each “existing source,” there was jousting over how the language should be read.
The major questions doctrine was raised repeatedly throughout the argument, largely as an input to the statutory interpretation inquiry, rather than as a stalking horse for the nondelegation doctrine. No justice put forward the argument that Congress lacked the
Article from Reason.com
