Supreme Court Revitalizes Trump Era Environmental Regulation

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Twenty states and the District of Columbia, along with environmental groups, objected to the arrangement, saying it violated federal law. After President Biden took office, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would review the rule and asked the three judges who presided over the challenges to return them to the agency.

However, the EPA did not ask judges to vacate the regulation while working on a new regulation. Two judges in South Carolina and Pennsylvania did what the agency asked.

However Judge William H. AlsupFrom the Federal District Court in San Francisco, voided the regulation. The move, “lack of reasoned decision-making and blatant errors within the rule’s documentation, are indications that the rule is contrary to the structure and purpose of the Clean Water Act” and “EPA itself signaled that it would not or would not accept the same rule.”

Louisiana and other Republican-led states, along with industry groups, filed a lawsuit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco refused to block Judge Alsup’s decision as an appeal progressed. emergency application He asked the Supreme Court to reorganize the regulation. They said that Judge Alsup acted without considering administrative procedures or finding the regulation unlawful.

write on behalf of the EPA, US Attorney General Elizabeth B. Prelogar urged the Supreme Court to reject the urgent appeal. Judge Alsup’s decision, he wrote, simply reinstated the old ordinance that had been in effect for half a century. She added that the 2020 regulation will likely be changed next year.

Miss Prelogar’s summary contained an important concession. “Federal defendants,” he wrote, “agree with the applicants that the district court does not have the power to vacate the 2020 rule without first determining that the rule is invalid.” But that wasn’t reason enough to hinder her decision, she said.

Judge Kagan, in his dissent, wrote that the court order is a solution to the problem-seeking.

“The removal request is based on simple claims – assumptions about what states will hesitate to do now that are not supported by present-day evidence,” he wrote. “And the application does not demonstrate that the proper enforcement of the reinstated regulatory regime that existed 50 years before the vacated rule came into effect is incapable of countering state overruns whatever may (but may not) occur.”

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