The Supreme Court stopped just short of killing the regulatory state

The EPA and other agencies are a necessity in the 21st century.

Today’s Supreme Court decision restricting the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to fight climate change has left the regulatory state hanging by a thread.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruled that despite the authority lawmakers gave the EPA to limit harmful chemicals in the air, the design of its regulations on power plants emissions would have a sweeping impact on the economy and the country, raising the decision to the level of a “major question” that only elected officials can answer. But in her dissent, justice Elena Kagan responds that the Court is in effect substituting its own judgment for that of the lawmakers who told the agency to “select the ‘best system of emission reduction’ for power plants.”

Radical conservatives in the Supreme Court majority have argued that federal agencies should have less discretion to make rules, but today’s decision mainly focused on how environmental regulators interpreted the Clean Air Act. So while it sets back efforts to slow climate change, it didn’t kick the legs out from under the EPA and other expert agencies that do much of the important work of modern government—yet.

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