Well, that didn’t take long. Just months after the Biden administration issued new regulations designed to limit the amount of “forever chemicals” in drinking water, the companies who manufacture them have assembled a highly paid team oflawyers to sue the EPA. They are not claiming their products are good for people.
In a separate petition, the American Water Works Association and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies said the EPA had “significantly underestimated the costs” of the rule. Taxpayers could ultimately foot the bill in the form of increased water rates, they said, which is undoubtedly true. Industry groups are famous for foisting off the cost of cleaning up their messes onto the shoulders of someone else. Superfund sites? Let taxpayers pay.
“Despite these significant implications, the Court has not been clear about the doctrine’s origins or purpose. Some defenses of the doctrine have sought to justify it as an intuition about how Congress writes statutes, a kind of linguistic canon. Others, including Justice Gorsuch, attempt to root the doctrine in the Constitution, grounding it in the nondelegation doctrine.”article maintains, “because constitutionally inspired doctrines have more bite than linguistic canons.
The US Supreme Court as currently constituted is determined to bring an end to the administrative state, the one thatreactionaries call the “deep state” where people with real expertise make policy decisions based on science, not ideology. The logical extension of the “major questions” doctrine is that Congress should be doing what agencies like the EPA are doing.