All right, this piece has triggered me so I have to yell a bit (though this is bluesky, so I realize I'm just preaching at the choir):
www.nytimes.com
This bit right here. This is John Roberts basically admitting, explicitly, that he is dreaming up a legal doctrine out of nothing because he does not like or approve of Obama's policy:
Put aside, for a moment, what a fucking mockery this makes of the law -- how plain it makes it that conservative jurisprudence works backward from its desired outcomes. Lots of other people have yelled about that. It's worth yelling about. Instead, though, let's look at the substance. Roberts said that Obama's Clean Power Plan would be "the most expensive regulation every imposed on the power sector." (Again, putting aside that whether it's expensive just isn't his fucking business, has nothing to do with the law.) And so he killed it -- put a stay on it until Trump was elected. So the Clean Power Plan was never implemented. Now, want to hear something funny? The targets in the Clean Power Plan -- for growth in clean energy, for retirements of dirty energy -- were exceeded. Before the deadline. *Without the reg being passed.* Really gotta emphasize this: the targets & requirements in the Clean Power Plan were *so* modest, *so* conservative, *so* unambitious that *the power sector met them anyway, in the course of normal market operation*. The regs would have had basically no effect at all relative to the status quo. Another way of saying this is that the regulations would have had a cost of zero. They would not have required the power sector to do anything it wasn't going to do already. Roberts said it would be the most expensive reg ever (because he heard that on Fox). But it cost nothing. And on the basis of this -- a pure policy disagreement about which he was demonstrably, wildly wrong -- Roberts dreamed up "major questions doctrine" & thereby rendered US law one big game of Calvinball. You just can't exaggerate how low, how scummy, how dumb, how fraudulent it all was. However low your opinion of the Roberts Court, it should be lower.