Supreme Court may gut EPA, other agencies, in third unscheduled decision day

The highest court still is not done.

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will meet for another previously unscheduled decision day, the third added at the last minute to the end of a truly historic June.

A case against the Environmental Protection Agency, led by West Virginia but joined by dozens of states, could curb the regulatory powers of that agency, but could also change the ability of any number of federal bureaucracies to broadly issue regulations not outlined by legislation.

“One thing we said is that Congress must speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance,” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained to the U.S. Solicitor General in April.

“The second thing we said is that the Court greets with a measure of skepticism when agencies claim to have found in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy,” he said.

The case in question, West Virginia v. EPA, stems from a D.C. District Court’s ruling that threw out a Trump-era rule replacing Obama-era regulations.

Trump’s EPA wanted the Obama-era Clean Power Plan repealed, but their replacement, the “Affordable Clean Energy rule” was thrown out by the lower court for being “arbitrary and capricious.”

That returned emission standards to the rules established under the Clean Power Plan. The states sued, saying the EPA was digging up old rules, appealing to the court’s “major questions” doctrine.

The ruling, if decided in favor of the states, could impact a wide range of government agencies which regulate American life outside the express writing of their legislative mandate.

The court most recently applied the doctrine in a case overturning Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s workplace vaccine rules.

The court has four cases still to decide, including a case concerning the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy.