Editorial: Conservatives no more: Supreme Court’s ruling on EPA’s right to regulate greenhouse gases is a capper on a radical term

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
·2 min read
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First, a “textualist” Supreme Court majority ignored the Second Amendment clause attaching gun rights to “a well regulated Militia.” Cherry-picking history to claim that carrying a weapon has always been protected, the “conservatives” killed a century-old New York statute regulating the concealed carry of firearms and elevated a newly contrived individual right to self-defense that appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Then the majority, saying women’s right to bodily autonomy appears nowhere in the Constitution, empowered states to bar women from terminating pregnancies starting at the moment of conception, again embracing a reading of America’s past that’s not only wrong, but of dubious relevance.

The logical acrobatics make the head hurt. The Constitution’s words matter, except when they don’t. History and precedent are controlling, except when they’re not.

Now add this to the pile of hypocrisies: The words in laws passed by Congress matter, except when they don’t. So say six justices in asserting that the Environmental Protection Agency has no authority to issue “generation shifting” regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions at power plants to combat a gargantuan problem called climate change.

Congress didn’t explicitly call for such rules, they assert, ergo the EPA overstepped its bounds. Justice Elena Kagan explodes that contention in her dissent:

“The majority says it is simply ‘not plausible’ that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shifting. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the ‘best system of emission reduction’ for power plants. The ‘best system’ full stop — no ifs, ands, or buts of any kind relevant here.”

“The majority’s decision rests on one claim alone: that generation shifting is just too new and too big a deal for Congress to have authorized it...But that is wrong. A key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems.”

”The majority today overrides that legislative choice.”

The Supreme Court majority’s brazen hypocrisy, unlike U.S. power generation, is endlessly renewable.

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