Word: epa
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...already seen the power the Court has over global warming legislation. In April of 2007, the Court shocked the Bush Administration when it ruled against the federal government in the landmark case of Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The state was pushing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act; the agency denied it had that right. To the surprise of many, the White House not the least, the Court ruled in favor of Massachusetts, issuing a majority opinion that the EPA did have the right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and that under...
That case might make the current Court appear hospitable to environmentalists. But Massachusetts v. EPA was another of the Court's many 5-4, bitterly divided rulings, with both Justice Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts dissenting from the majority. Those two happen to be the Justices whom McCain says he would like his possible future Court nominees to emulate. "One more conservative on the Court and [the Massachusetts] case would have likely gone the other way," says Kendall. "You have to think about what's going to happen to the composition of the Court over the next eight years...
Beyond the Court, the next President will also control the EPA, an agency that under Bush has been almost wholly defanged: that much became clearer on July 11, when the EPA released a 588-page federal notice rejecting federal regulation of greenhouse gases - essentially ignoring the Court's 2007 ruling. The agency claimed that greenhouse gas regulation would lead to too many job losses, and found it wasn't clear that global warming poses a threat to people's health. Given enough time, environmental groups would almost certainly sue to reverse the EPA's ruling, but with the Bush Administration...
...central goal of Libertarianism is hard to disagree with: freedom. Defining it is another matter. Party members I've met often speak of freedom as if it were a phantom limb: you're born with it, but it gets taken from you by the bureaucratic violence of the EPA, the ATF, the DOE, the DEA, the U.N., NCLB, NAFTA and--above all--the IRS. Freedom's restoration is the magic moment when the nanny state melts away and you can see the life you were supposed to live before the tax auditors and environmental regulators and drug warriors all came...
...Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Alito versus John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer) with the conservatives winning 13 and the liberals getting six. Says Lazarus, "The only really big case the liberals won 5-4 last term was the global warming case, Massachusetts v. EPA." This term, by contrast, was much more unpredictable and harder to define...