Judicial hubris

FT.com / World / International economy - Supreme Court clashes over climate change:
"The global political battle over climate change was also being fought at the US Supreme Court on Wednesday as judges bickered over the role of greenhouse gas emissions in global warming and disagreed on whether the Environmental Protection Agency had the power to refuse to regulate such emissions."

What a waste of time! And, worse than the waste of time is the fact that one bad precedent has already been set and another is likely.

This case should have been laughed out of court without a hearing on the merits of the case because it has none. No state or group of states has standing to sue a federal agency over what amounts to a policy disagreement. Back before the direct election of US senators, one of their major roles was to represent the interests of states, as states, in the federal legislative process. Now, the only recourse an aggrieved state has is to secede and adopt whatever policies it feels best serve the interests of its citizens.

Even if one concedes the point that a state has standing to sue over a policy dispute, the suit should still have been dismissed for failure to show that Congress ever intended to delegate power to EPA to regulate climate. While it has become fashionable to speak of GHGs as "pollutants," it is clear that was not what Congress envisioned when the EPA was formed, was not a role of any prior federal activity subsumed by EPA and has not been delegated to EPA since its inception.

Of course, no conceivable majority of the Supreme Court could ever consider a case like this in a constitutional manner - as their oath of office demands - because it would leave them without power to determine federal policy.