We Are All Going To Die!
The Supreme Court closed out one of its most consequential sessions in history yesterday, with its ruling in West Virginia v EPA, a case that goes to the heart of a growing problem: the Legislative Branch's abdication of rule making to the Executive Branch and its alphabet soup of agencies. In doing so, it continued a trend of checking the on-going abandonment of the non-delegation doctrine.
The gist of the ruling, which broke down 6-3 across the expected lines, is that Congress didn't explicitly authorize the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide across the entire energy producing industry, therefore the EPA cannot take it upon itself to do so. The nuts and bolts of the ruling involve legal theory and precedents that I haven't fully digested, but I think I'm not off-base in simplifying the conclusion as I have.
The entertaining part of all this is the usual sky-scream antics from the Left. You might think they'd be too hoarse to scream after last week's Bruen and Dobbs rulings, both of which produced “We are all going to die!” hyperbole.
It appears, however, that they have pipes even more enduring than Giovanni Jones exhibited under Bugs "Leopold" Bunny.
Behold more existential hyperbole. Don't blame me for the salty language.
The Supreme Court Just Fucked the Planet
The Right-Wing Supreme Court Readies to Help Destroy the Planet
And, finally, the telling of the tale at NPR:
By insisting that Congress must specifically authorize significant rules at a time when the justices know that Congress is effectively dysfunctional, the court threatens to upend the national government's ability to safeguard the public health and welfare.
Justice Kagan's dissent:
And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening. Respectfully, I dissent.
As we've seen time and again from the Left, the assertion of a crisis of sufficient urgency is considered justification for the preemption or circumvention of process, laws, and Constitutional limits. All the Court said is that the EPA needs additional Congressional authorization to act against carbon dioxide on an industry-wide basis. That Congress didn’t grant the EPA unbounded authority (Kagan’s assertion notwithstanding). That the rebuttals skip process, existing statute, and the Constitution and run straight to hyperbole and emotional fear-mongering affirms that the Left doesn't give a flying rat's patootie about any of that when it gets in the way of their agenda.
What makes this farcical is that Congress could give the EPA the authority the Court decided it currently lacks. Easy peasy lemon squeezey. This fact seems to have escaped the Grande Dame of Harridans:
Bernie Sanders 2.0 also had something to say, of course. Because Mean Girl tweets are so productive:
The scourging of the Court by the rage-aholic Left is a tacit admission that the Democrats didn’t get enough seats in Congress this past election to push their agenda, and NPR’s assertion that Congress is ‘dysfunctional’ shows that, even with an evenly split Congress, the Left has no interest in compromise or bipartisanship, and Kagan’s dissent ignores a core feature of our nation - the separation of powers.
What makes this even more farcical is that this green agenda is futility writ large. As I've blogged time and again, a brute-force carbon reduction effort is, barring a transformative invention that solves a long list of problems, doomed to failure. The BRICS nations and the developing world will simply not impoverish or keep in poverty their citizens to satisfy the dilettantes for whom higher energy costs are a mere inconvenience, and that's before we dive into the disruptions, resource problems, acreage problems, and unfathomable cost of this form of remedy.
Even if America were indeed to get to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions, the impact on global temps will be miniscule. We're far better off dealing with whatever problems emerge as they emerge, than blowing our economy and our lives apart today against a pittance of future payoff.
None of this matters to the Left. The argument is, "since we cannot rely on Congress to act as we demand, and things are so dire, the EPA must be free to do so."
This is not representative government. This is not how a Constitutional Republic operates. This is political thuggery.
It echoes Rahm Emanuel's notorious "never let a crisis go to waste" rule, and it shows us that the Left is walking the same walk as the 20th century dictators that brought ruin to their nations and so much brutality to the world.
If the outcome is of sufficient importance to the Left, the crisis will be highlighted, amplified, exaggerated, and cast in existential Manicheanism. As now happens with more crises than I can count.
The increased volume and stridency is a good omen, fortunately. It tells us they're losing the war - and make no mistake, this is a war. Over liberty, over Constitutional values and those born of the Enlightenment, over control of our lives, and over the living standards that all these have served to improve across the centuries.
Let them scream, pound the tables, and call us names. The louder they shriek, the more they admit they’re not winning hearts or minds. Their true colors are shining through, and every failed prognostication of imminent disaster weakens their grip on America a bit more.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.
I doubt we're all gonna die. I'm pretty sure at least as many people as survived the biblical flooding of Manhattan in 2013 will survive the Earth catching fire later this year.
Congressional authorization for the executive branch to do anything naturally has to have limits.
The best thing: this ruling opens up other opportunities to roll back regulations where the executive branch has interpreted congressional authorization as a blank check. Let the litigation begin.