EPA's loss good for democracy

 Washington Examiner:

If the federal government wants to restructure an entire sector of the economy, it needs explicit authority from Congress, the Supreme Court held Thursday. Its ruling in EPA v. West Virginia will save consumers billions of dollars in energy costs. More importantly, it takes power away from unelected bureaucrats and returns it to the people’s elected leaders.

A number of states with large coal economies had challenged an Obama-era regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency that essentially capped the carbon emissions that could be emitted by existing coal power plants. The Obama EPA regulation came after Congress had specifically debated and rejected an economy-wide cap-and-trade policy in 2010.

After winning reelection in 2012, however, President Barack Obama famously told his Cabinet, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” meaning he would use his pen to sign executive actions bypassing Congress wherever possible. The EPA’s subsequent 2015 Clean Power Plan was part of Obama’s “pen and phone” strategy.

For decades, the EPA had regulated coal power plants through Section 111 of the 1970 Clean Air Act that empowered the EPA to identify a “best system of emission reduction” and then force existing power plants to meet that standard. Importantly, the “best system of emission reduction” must be “adequately demonstrated,” meaning the EPA couldn’t force a “best system” that was deliberately impossible to as to put them all out of operation.

But this is exactly what Obama’s Clean Power Plan tried to do. Instead of setting a best-practice standard for coal plants to meet, it set a cap on carbon emissions and said that once a plant reached that cap, it either had to stop producing electricity, invest in a clean power plant, or buy emissions allowances. Instead of making sure individual coal plants were being run as cleanly as possible, Obama was trying to shut them all down entirely. The Obama EPA was essentially trying to repurpose the 1970 Clean Air Act to create the very industry-wide cap-and-trade system that Congress had specifically rejected five years earlier.

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It is more than ironic that the party that is always talking about defending "our democracy" is actually the one trying to thwart it with leaders like Obama.  This is a good opinion by the Supreme court that will make Democrats use the democratic process to institute change.