Twenty-one states are currently challenging an emissions standards rule promulgated by the Biden Administration which would force them to create emission standards and then report back with their progress on those standards to the federal government. The rule comes from the Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration and is meant to reduce CO2 emissions.
The Republican attorneys general, led by Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron, argue that the rule would both harm rural areas where long distances and the lack of useful public transportation make driving more necessary than in urban areas, and that it is unconstitutional. The coalition is composed, in addition to Cameron’s Kentucky, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Announcing the effort to fight back against the new rule, AG Daniel Cameron’s office argued that the rule is unconstitutional because Congress never granted the Department of Transportation the ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“President Biden is unconstitutionally ramming his radical climate agenda through administrative agencies that lack Congressional authority to implement such actions. We will not stand by while this administration attempts to circumvent the legislative process,” Cameron said in a statement on the matter.
Similarly, the coalition led by Cameron argued, “Congress has not given FHWA or DOT authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Nor can the Agencies compel the States to administer a federal regulatory program or mandate them to further Executive policy wishes absent some other authority to do so—which is lacking as to this rule.”
Explaining their argument about the rule being unconstitutional in the complaint itself, that red state coalition argued, “The Constitution is also clear that action by the States cannot be mandated through federal action like the Final Rule. ‘The Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.’ [because] ‘the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.’”
Continuing, they went on to note that the issue isn’t necessarily whether the rule would be helpful or if reducing CO2 would be effected by the new rule against which they are fighting, but what entities have what power under the constitution and that, here, the rule is unconstitutional. They said, “[e]ven if Congress believed the Final Rule was the best means of reducing CO2 in order to address climate change, the States could not be directed to implement the policy choices of the federal government.”
Montana AG Austin Knudsen, for his part, said, “This rule is another unlawful and overreaching regulation by the Biden Administration to force the President’s radical green agenda onto Americans regardless of the costs. This one-size-fits-all approach might work for the Washington, DC bureaucrats who cooked it up, but it won’t work for Montana.”
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