SCOTUS screws it up again. Thanks Nino–you jerk

In the balance of powers arguments related to legislative and executive powers, the questions of delegation by the Congress and discretion by agencies are subject to some close interpretation by the SCOTUS.

Unfortunately the SCOTUS is composed of elitist oligarchs who want an administrative state. After all, oligarchs are like them–suffering from the fatal conceit.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303939404579531814034036286?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303939404579531814034036286.html&fpid=2,7,121,122,201,401,641,1009&cb=logged0.36800001382666847
The EPA Unchained
The Supreme Court reinstates a cross-state pollution rule.
April 29, 2014 7:29 p.m. ET
The next time someone says the John Roberts Supreme Court consistently blocks Obama Administration policy, be sure to recall the ObamaCare case. But right behind that you can mention Tuesday’s 6-2 ruling that anoints the Environmental Protection Agency’s habit of rewriting the Clean Air Act and even offers a convenient legal rationale that the EPA hadn’t offered.
Chief Justice Roberts—this is becoming a habit—and Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four liberal Justices to overturn a D.C. Circuit appellate panel and revive the EPA’s 2011 cross-state pollution rule. In EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, Texas and more than a dozen states and some private companies had challenged the rule for violating state prerogatives under the statute.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts (L) and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. Getty Images
No one disputes the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollution across state lines, but for the first time the EPA imposed its standards without giving states a chance to offer their own plans. Also for the first time, the agency imposed a uniform compliance standard regardless of an individual state’s contribution to cross-state pollution. This is aimed at Texas and other states that have large coal-fired electric plants and forces higher reductions in emissions than states might otherwise have to implement. It is part of the Administration’s agenda of imposing via regulation what it can’t get through Congress, even a Democratic Senate.
Remarkably, the majority doesn’t even mention the EPA’s own legal justification for its Clean Air rewrite, which hangs on the meaning of the word “significantly.” (We won’t torture you with the details.) Instead, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg detects what she calls a “gap” in the statute on how states should share responsibility for their share of pollution, and then proceeds to fill it with her own cost-benefit legal rationale. This cost-benefit defense of the EPA is ironically amusing because the EPA typically dismisses cost-benefit analysis unless a statute explicitly calls for it.
As Justice Antonin Scalia notes in his dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, the statute is relatively clear about the allocation of costs and “contains a gap only for those who blind themselves to the obvious in order to pursue a preferred policy.” Even if the EPA’s emissions standards are more cost-effective overall, that may not be true for every upwind state, and the EPA cannot simply ignore the federalist obligations of the Clean Air Act to impose them.
The decision is a reminder of how deferential the courts usually are to executive regulation, far more than they should be in this era when the Obama Administration is broadcasting—even boasting about—its policy of govern-by-regulation. The D.C. Circuit rarely overturns a federal rule, and the Supreme Court tends to accept an appeal only when the government loses.
The decision is also a reminder that in this era of the ever-growing administrative state, control of the executive is more important than ever. Congress can only do so much to check federal government encroachment on private industry and state sovereign powers.
As Justice Scalia wrote, “Too many important decisions of the Federal Government are made nowadays by unelected agency officials exercising broad lawmaking authority, rather than by the people’s representatives in Congress.” The danger after Tuesday’s ruling is that the Obama EPA will feel even less bound by legal restraints, if that’s possible.
I would suggest that Scalia opened the door on agency discretion, and Roberts and Kennedy just walked in.
I suffer from the stupidity of these oligarchs.
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