Environmentalists and Democratic state officials on Wednesday hit back at President Trump’s attempt to stop a federal court from finishing its review of Obama-era climate regulations by detailing to judges the “five fatal defects” of his legal arguments to do so.
The Trump administration asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week to refrain from ruling on the Clean Power Plan until the Environmental Protection Agency has time to review the climate rule with the intent of rolling is back completely.
A coalition of environmental groups, together with over a dozen states defending the Obama-era climate rule, submitted their response in court to the Trump request.
“The motion comes at the latest possible stage of the Court’s review of the current Rule—after more than six months of deliberation following a full day en banc oral argument and almost a year after the conclusion of briefing—and is premised upon the earliest possible stage of a review of the Rule that may lead to a new rulemaking of indeterminate length and outcome,” read a brief submitted by the green groups.
“EPA’s motion suffers from five fatal defects,” they argued.
“First, the relief EPA seeks flouts the terms of the order by which the Supreme Court temporarily stayed enforcement of the Rule,” according to the groups’ petition. The Supreme Court stayed the rule last year until all judicial review had concluded. But the Supreme Court did not invalidate the Rule, the argument continued.
“Granting EPA’s motion would effectively convert that temporary enforcement relief [granted by the high court] pending judicial review into a long-term suspension of the Rule likely continuing for years, without any court having issued any decision on the Rule’s merits,” the groups said in their legal brief.
The second fatal flaw is that the “outcome violates fundamental requirements” of both the Clean Air Act and the Administrative Procedures Act, “which forbid agency suspensions of rules without notice and comment rulemaking and a reasoned explanation.” Trump’s motion for abeyance asks the court’s assistance “to do what it could not do otherwise: effectively and indefinitely suspend a duly promulgated rule without proposing, taking comment on, justifying, or defending in court any legal or factual premises that might support such a result.”
The third fatal flaw: “Judicial economy strongly favors this Court proceeding to issue its decision.” Put more plainly, they argue it is a waste of the court’s time to hold the rule in abeyance after spending months and resources to review it.
The fourth flaw refers to the consequences of holding the regulation in abeyance. Granting the motion would “severely prejudice the public health and environmental Respondent-Intervenors.”
The fifth and final fatal flaw argued that the arguments the EPA is advancing are “only insubstantial arguments for abeyance. Rejecting the motion and deciding the current case would in no way interfere with EPA’s ‘opportunity to fully review the Clean Power Plan,'” the groups argued.
In other words, they do not need the court to hold their decision on abeyance in order to redo the climate regulations, and potentially do away with them.
“For all these reasons, this Court should reject attempts to further delay adjudicating the validity of EPA’s Rule,” the groups’ brief concluded. “The agency cannot be allowed to accomplish through abeyance something it cannot do on its own: an indefinite suspension of a duly promulgated rule without judicial review, without a notice and comment rulemaking, and without any reasoned explanation.”
The main point of the states’ arguments is that the court’s decision is too important not to proceed, and nothing that the Trump administration has argued obviates it from issuing a rule.
