Elaborating on earlier decisions, the high court said federal agencies need explicit authorization from Congress to decide issues of major economic and political significance, drawing on a principle known as the “major questions doctrine.”
In his decision for the 6-3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said Congress never gave the EPA the authority to change the methods a power plant uses—regulations known as “generation shifting” requirements.
Chief Justice Roberts said that forcing a nationwide transition away from coal may be a “sensible” idea, but the EPA cannot do so without a clear authority from Congress.
“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” the chief justice wrote, adding that the “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute.”
The chief justice’s opinion was joined by the court’s conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Justice Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion that was joined by Justice Alito.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent on behalf of herself, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Stephen Breyer, whose retirement becomes effective on Thursday.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the importance of the ruling cannot be overstated.
“Today, the Supreme Court has taken a major step to restore representative government and require legislators, not bureaucrats, to make the major policy decisions affecting the lives of Americans,” the group’s executive vice president, Derrick Morgan, said in a statement.
The decision is a warning to regulatory agencies that they should be wary of interpreting old laws to give them broad new powers, said Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
“Finding dormant regulatory authority in pre-existing statutes is something the court disfavors,” Mr. Adler said.
Mr. Adler said the ruling is similar to the court’s January decision blocking the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for larger employers.
Several environmental groups quickly condemned Thursday’s ruling. “Today’s decision leaves the most powerful country on Earth fighting our greatest existential crisis with one hand tied behind our back,” said Aimee Delach, an analyst at the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife. “No country has contributed as heavily to climate change as the United States, and now we have few options to turn back the clock. This is a dark day for our planet and the countless species that may perish as a result.”
West Virginia led a coalition of Republican-leaning states and coal producers that asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and clarify the limits of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority, raising broader questions about how far the regulatory authority of federal agencies extends. The coalition said powerful and wide-reaching policies should come from Congress, not agency-level regulators.
The Obama-era EPA rules were “illustrative of an alarming trend whereby presidents turn to implied authority, typically in long-extant statutes, to achieve what Congress fails to do,” the libertarian Cato Institute said in a legal brief.
The case before the high court was unusual because it involved regulations put forth by the Obama administration that never went into effect and were replaced in 2019 under the Trump administration. At issue was the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era set of rules devised by the EPA that sought to mandate a national shift away from coal to cleaner sources of power, including natural gas, wind and solar.
For half a century, the Clean Air Act has directed the EPA to regulate stationary sources of air pollution that endanger “public health or welfare.” The Obama-era Clean Power Plan extended that regulatory reach beyond the physical premises of a power plant to allow off-site methods to mitigate pollution.
The Supreme Court in 2016 halted the Clean Power Plan from taking effect, but the justices never directly addressed whether the rule was unlawful. The Trump administration in 2019 overturned the plan, replacing it with industry-friendly rules allowing older power plants to continue operating.
In January 2021, at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia struck down his administration’s replacement rule, providing the Biden administration with a clean slate to work from in devising its own carbon-emissions rules.
The EPA powers at issue are central to President Biden’s climate agenda. With fragile majorities in the Senate and House, Democrats have limited ability to advance their platform through new legislation. Like his recent predecessors, Mr. Biden is poised to govern through agencies such as the EPA, relying on his inherent constitutional authority and the statutory powers provided by existing legislation.
Presidents from both parties have increasingly governed by executive order when their agendas are stalled in Congress, often giving regulators vast power over swaths of the economy.
Many conservative lawyers have criticized this expansion of regulatory power, saying it isn’t consistent with the “separation of powers” framework in the Constitution. Some liberals have defended the shift toward administrative governance, which can traced back to the New Deal, saying Congress can and should delegate authority to agencies with more expertise.
Some energy businesses outside the coal industry expressed support for the EPA’s existing authority. The Edison Electric Institute, the national association of all investor-owned electric companies, wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that stripping the agency of its authority to regulate emissions could “lead to a deluge of tort litigation” against emitters, shifting “regulation from a sensible and consistent nationwide regime governed by EPA and the states pursuant to a statutory scheme Congress designed, to a chaotic system dictated by the interests of individual plaintiffs.”
The Supreme Court has increasingly reined in federal agencies in recent years, saying agency rules relating to issues of major economic and political significance should be invalidated unless Congress made explicitly clear it ceded that power to those executive-branch entities.
Some energy businesses outside the coal industry expressed support for the EPA’s existing authority. The Edison Electric Institute, the national association of investor-owned electric companies, wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that stripping the agency of its authority to regulate emissions could “lead to a deluge of tort litigation” against emitters, shifting “regulation from a sensible and consistent nationwide regime governed by EPA and the States pursuant to a statutory scheme Congress designed, to a chaotic system dictated by the interests of individual plaintiffs.”