No matter how you feel about coal industry emissions, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey’s fight of proposed new rules by the Environmental Protection Agency is a just cause.
That’s because the fight Morrisey is leading is as much about containing potentially unlawful regulatory creep as it is about protecting the coal industry.
West Virginia is one of 12 states that has filed a lawsuit against the EPA, claiming proposed regulations are illegal because they seek to require states to regulate coal-fired power plants even though the agency already regulates those plants under the hazardous air pollutant program.
The Clean Air Act prohibits double regulation, reported the Daily Mail’s Whitney Burdette.
“We’re David to the federal government’s Goliath,” Morrisey, a Republican, said Wednesday in a meeting with the Daily Mail’s editorial board.
“It’s really important to challenge the EPA when they overreach because it has a direct impact on West Virginia and the American economy.”
It’s not just Morrisey or Republicans speaking out against the EPA’s regulatory creep.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has proposed legislation aimed at softening the economic blow the proposals could cause if they go into effect.
“We need the EPA and our federal government to work with us as allies, not as adversaries who continually implement onerous regulations and move the goalposts before we even have a chance to comply,” Manchin said.
“Only at a government agency run by unelected bureaucrats would it make sense to impose regulations that cost billions of dollars, increase the costs of electricity, negatively impact grid reliability, undermine global competitiveness and kill jobs,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.
And it’s not just West Virginia’s elected officials speaking out against regulatory creep.
“Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency,” wrote Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, in a 2013 Washington Post op-ed column.
Good luck to Morrisey and the legal team arguing before the D.C. Court of Appeals. Much more than the coal industry is at stake.