Washington, DC – On news this morning that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the case of Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, Constitutional Accountability Center President Doug Kendall released the following reaction:

“In a lopsided decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the D.C. Circuit’s adventurism in rewriting the plain text of the Clean Air Act. Justice Ginsburg, joined by five of her colleagues – including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy – concluded that the conservative majority on the lower court sought to impose a solution that misread the Act, improperly second-guessed the EPA and ‘works neither mathematically nor in practical application.’

“As CAC’s brief to the Court explains,” Kendall continued, “interstate air pollution is the quintessential example of the type of national problem the Framers designed our Federal government to address. The Court accepts this premise and thoroughly rejects the D.C. Circuit’s attempt to hobble the Federal government’s power out of misplaced deference to states’ rights.

“One prominent columnist has called the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Homer a ‘judicial jihad against the regulatory state.’ Today, Justices across the ideological spectrum told the D.C. Circuit to call it off,” Kendall said.

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Resources:

*  CAC’s “friend of the court” brief in EPA v. EME Homer: http://theusconstitution.org/sites/default/files/briefs/CAC_EPA_v_EME%20Homer_Brief.pdf

*  “Six Reasons Why EME Homer Is a Case Worth Watching,” Tom Donnelly, December 5, 2013: http://theusconstitution.org/text-history/2384/six-reasons-why-eme-homer-case-worth-watching

*  “The judicial jihad against the regulatory state,” Steven Pearlstein, October 13, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-judicial-jihad-against-the-regulatory-state/2012/10/12/d9eb080c-13ca-11e2-bf18-a8a596df4bee_story.html 

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Constitutional Accountability Center (www.theusconstitution.org) is a think tank, public interest law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of the Constitution’s text and history.

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