Supreme Court Rules on EPA

The people of America received help from an unlikely source yesterday: the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with reactionary idealogues, ruled against the administration and effectively in favor of more stringent emissions regulation. The New York Times story is here: Justices Say E.P.A. Has Power to Act on Harmful Gases

Now I admit the justices did not say outright that the EPA ought to regulate emissions more stringently, but that is the real effect of their ruling because they disagreed with the Bush view that the legislation covering the EPA’s duties on emmissions is too limited and, instead, agreed that the EPA can in fact support emissions regulation.

That’s all a bit convoluted, so here’s the simple version: Bush has said since he came into office and overuled the Clinton apporach to regulation that the EPA has no mandate to enforce emissions regulation. He says that there is no specific wording in any law to force the EPA down that road and hence the EPA should cease its activities with regard to matters such as global warming. As a result, during the Bush administration the EPA has been prevented from supporting efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. In fact it has often opposed them. Because of this, a number of states, with California and those in the Northeast in the vanguard, have assumed the responsibility to attack the greenhouse gas probelm themselves. The EPA and the Bush administration have tried, along with industry groups such as the auto makers, to stop this state driven effort. The states sued to be able to continue, and the Supreme Court has found in their favor by saying the EPA does indeed have a mandate in this area, even though there is no explicit legislation saying so.

This is a major setback for Bush and his efforts to cripple the effectiveness of the Federal government. It is also ironic in a couple of ways: the Supreme Court is solidly Republican, and yet it issued a judgement that sides with a whole bunch of more liberal states; and this is a clear instance of the pro-industry rather than states rights approach of Bush. Typically the Republicans would advocate the supremacy of “state’s rights”, but in this case, because their big business backers said so they tried to crush the states.

Consistency and principle are not what they were in the red states!

Anyway: score one for the people, even though it hurts to say thank you to the Supreme Court.