Restraint on the EPA?

National Review Online notes that Supreme Court hearings in West Virginia v. EPA begin today.

We need this even less than West Virginia wants it. (Image by Flash Dantz, via Unsplash, license.)

[Under the EPA's "Clean Power Plan,"] States would then be expected to develop plans to meet the emission reductions. States that did not develop a plan that met the EPA's approval would be subject to the agency's own federal implementation plan. One way or another, a state like West Virginia that wanted no part of this scheme would find itself forced into a California-type energy grid, complete with California-type shortages and energy prices. For some liberals, such shortages are a feature, not a bug of the system -- part of the package entailed by the forced reduction of consumption.

West Virginia led a coalition of states and groups in a challenge of the CPP in court. As the litigation proceeded, the Supreme Court in 2016 stayed the rule by a 5-4 vote, pending the disposition of appellate review. Justice Scalia was in the majority for what turned out to be one of his final acts on the Court. That seemed to signal the challengers' ultimate success on the merits. Before the case made its way out of the D.C. Circuit and back to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump became president. The case was held in abeyance and ultimately dismissed.

Trump replaced the EPA rule with a less stringent one (that leftist states predictably challenged) and then, of course, Biden got elected and (just as predictably) tightened the energy noose again.

One hopes the court reins in the EPA, if for no other reason than for such regulations -- bad enough on their own -- to become more predictable at least in terms of the ability of Washington to change them from one election to the next.

I am no fan of the popular misconception of "states rights" (aka fifty tyrannies), but the ability of some states to have less onerous regulations than others provides a form of breathing room until such a time as liberty becomes politically viable again.

-- CAV