You know the Obama administration has gone off the deep end when Prof. Laurence Tribe of Harvard, perhaps the dean of liberal law professors who over the years and decades has probably been on more Democratic short lists and liberal wish lists for a Supreme Court nomination than anyone else, accuses the Environmental Protection Agency of “asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.”
The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Tribe charges,
would effectively dictate the energy mix used in each state and leave the state with essentially no choice in implementing its plan. But Supreme Court precedent settled over two decades ago in New York v. United States (1992) and reaffirmed by a 7-2 vote as recently as 2012 in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare decision, holds that such federal commandeering of state governments defeats political accountability and violates principles of federalism that are basic to our constitutional order.
Even more fundamentally, the EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not….
Today the agency is again circumventing the checks Congress deliberately built into the Clean Air Act and distorting it to justify a wide-ranging carbon rule in a way Congress never intended or authorized.
Frustration with congressional inaction cannot justify throwing the Constitution overboard to rescue this lawless EPA proposal….
By now the Obama administration claiming powers it does not constitutionally have is a lamentably familiar song, but the singer here gives it a compelling new voice.
