E.P.A.'s Authority on Air Rules Wins Supreme Court's Backing nytimes.com
A rare bit of good news from the SC, somewhat in contrast to the recent ADA ruling.
The Supreme Court today unanimously
and decisively rejected an industry attack on
the Clean Air Act in one of the court's most
important environmental rulings in years.
In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the
court ruled that in setting national air quality
standards, the Environmental Protection
Agency must consider only the requirements
of public health and safety and may not engage
in the cost-benefit analysis that a coalition of industry groups sought to
import into the statute.
Further, the court held that the Environmental Protection Agency's broad
standard-setting authority did not amount to an unconstitutional
delegation by Congress of legislative power to an executive branch
agency. This part of the opinion rejected a ruling by a federal appeals
court here that was widely viewed as one of the most powerful judicial
attacks since the New Deal on the legal foundations of the modern
administrative state. . . .
In an opinion two years ago, a panel of the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit startled much of official
Washington and the legal world by reviving the so-called nondelegation
doctrine, which the Supreme Court had used to strike down two New
Deal programs in 1935 but that had fallen into great disfavor since them.
The 2-to-1 appeals court decision held that the Clean Air Act lacked an
"intelligible principle" for guiding the Environmental Protection Agency's
use of its regulatory power — leaving the agency theoretically free, for
example, to insist on bringing down to zero the permissible level of
pollutants for which there is no known safe amount. This amounted to an
undue delegation of legislative authority, the court said in an opinion that
raised the prospect that the statutory foundation of many federal agencies
could be open to similar attack. . . .
On the current court, Justice Scalia and Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist had, in past opinions, indicated the most interest in reviving the
nondelegation doctrine. It was therefore particularly interesting that the
chief justice, exercising his power to assign opinions, asked Justice Scalia
to write the court's opinion in today's Whitman v. American Trucking
Associations, No. 99-1257.
While joining Justice Scalia's opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a
separate concurring opinion to invite future nondelegation challenges and
announce that he would be open to considering them.
And so on. Of course, with Watt protege Norton at Interior keeping a close eye on Whitman at EPA, I don't imagine Rehnquist and company are too worried on the "enviromental extremist" versus "real American" front.
-Win. |
