I'm aware that powers not left to congress falls back to the states, you specifically mentioned regulation and this is in a thread about the EPA.
How is a state supposed to, on it's own, handle regulation against pollution from it's neighbors? How do they stop the state upstream? How do they they stop the state next door?
They are limiting the ability of the government to make and enforce laws. The EPA is created with Congressional authority and is empowered to act on their behalf.
Castrating the federal government will have negative repercussions. If the federal government doesn't have the power to control the states, then why bother having one?
Congress delegated their authority to the EPA. Congress is empowered to retain that authority and they're empowered to overrule any EPA regulation they disagree with. Congress retains all the power.
When it comes to the Supreme Court - that's it. Congress can't do anything about Supreme Court rulings. Your comparison of the EPA to the Supreme Court is misguided.
> Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill).
The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines. Not companies in the states, the states themselves. Then states can prevent that from happening however they like, but if they don't, the state itself owes the neighboring state(s) billions of dollars. Strict liability. And then you don't need any federal regulations telling anybody how to do it.
> And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
On zoning rules? It's hard to imagine people getting screwed much worse than they do now.
Legally, it's a very flimsy basis on which to attack the current structure and operation of the country. It is simply untrue that Congress is not allowed to delegate its powers, and where to draw the line has always been a subjective judgment that different courts have drawn differently. https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation03.html
And frankly, I think the anti-administrative state people are on the payroll of polluters who want the regulators to be politicians who are more dependent on big business for funds.
Congress should be allowed to leave things to the experts if it wants to. After all, it is free to change the scope of regulatory agencies at any time.
The states are a terrible choice for managing the environment. Pollution trivially crosses state borders, but often the impact is very local. IE the smell from a paper mill or sewage treatment plant doesn't spread across 1,000 miles.
So local control makes sense for local issues, and federal control makes sense for widespread issues like runoff.
There is certainly something to be said for placing clear limits on what Congress can do, but it's extraordinarily difficult to set out what they should be able to do ex ante and get it right. For example, it makes reasonable sense that the federal government should be in charge of the national defense, but then Washington is colonized by the defense industry which allocates itself a budget the size of Sweden's GDP. On the other hand, state governments have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to be captured by major industries within the state (e.g. coal in West Virginia, oil in Texas) and if it wasn't for the EPA those states would be [even more] uninhabitable, but we only have the EPA as a result of reading the commerce clause quite broadly. Making environmental regulations isn't specifically enumerated as a power of the federal government.
I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't one of having too much accountability. If terms were twice as long then politicians could spend half as much time campaigning and wouldn't have to take as much money from private interests to stay in office. If federal senators went back to being appointed by the state legislatures there would be less voting but there would also be less unwarranted federal interference in state affairs. And so on.
You're missing the point of a representative democracy. Under your logic congress could create despot agency and invest all of its congressional powers in to it and never bother actually representing its constituencies.
This is not about EPA enforcement of a congressional regulation. This is about the EPA both inventing the regulation and then doing the enforcement of it. Specifically about a large scale impacting regulations and then enforcing. If Congress mandated environmental guidelines that must be met in a timetable and enacted those regulations for the EPA to enforce the supreme Court would have held that as okay. The EPA is not acting with clear delegation from the representative body.
Because the state EPA sets the rules and the EPA is an executive branch function. State congress can overrule it by passing a law, but policy of an executive branch of government can be decided at whim by the governor.
The bureaucracies are much more accountable than the courts. Congress can limit them at will, and so can the executive, at any time. And the head bureaucrats are not only appointed by elected representatives, unlike supreme court judges, they can be relieved of their powers at any time for any reason.
The EPA wasn't determining law on their own. Congress decided to entrust them with the authority to regulate emissions of pollutants explicitly, and both Congress and the Executive can at any time limit their action if they feel like the EPA is overstepping. They did not, because both Congress and the Executive feels like the EPA is acting as they should.
Wow... if this is the actual impact, that seems... fair. Yeah, you can regulate pollution levels but not go a step further and regulate the inputs that create pollution, unless that power is vested in you by Congress.
Perhaps the state of LA has the power to stop this pollution, but the residents lobbying for help from regulators, as depicted in the article, seem to be focusing their attention on the federal EPA. Unless I accidentally skipped a paragraph that talked about lobbying at a regional level.
If the state doesn't lack the teeth to fix this, why would they choose to compete for federal attention with an order of magnitude more people?
They do, they just need to make laws that EPA can enforce. Not let EPA to act on its own. Isn't everyone always talking about unelected burecrauts going against the will of the people?
This is nonsense. Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA, which means that voters have the power to elect representatives to do just that if the EPA made a bad ruling.
And in this particular case, this isn't even remotely a bad ruling. The inability for markets to properly price in their negative externalities is the reason for our current looming crisis, and making up for the failures of markets by properly imposing those externalities is one of the most important roles of government.
I really appreciate your very consistent and clear arguments. I would feel much better if the arguments coming out of the Supreme Court right now were anywhere close to this consistent and clear. Please don't get me started on the EPA ruling ... in this case there's a very clear law on the books that permits the EPA to regulate pollution of the air and water and thus protect the citizenry from externalities that clearly cross state lines.
I don't think this is correct. Congress can definitely delegate its power, they are just saying that Congress didn't delegate the power the EPA is trying to use in this case.
From the final paragraph of the opinion:
"But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the
authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in
Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body."
So it seems that Congress can still give the EPA a more clear delegation that they have this power.
How is a state supposed to, on it's own, handle regulation against pollution from it's neighbors? How do they stop the state upstream? How do they they stop the state next door?
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