by GAO Webadmin
Chris Horner, an attorney for the GAO in several open records cases as well as amicus briefs that tell the court what’s going on with the regulatory attacks we’re seeing, had a piece on Monday. The Wall Street Journal combine the two topics.
This item is built on Horner’s newest two Journal pieces, “EPA Defies the Supreme Court” (August 2023) and “EPA’s Deceptive Climate Regulations Won’t Stand in Court” (May 2024). The common thread is that the group of scornful regulators has gone too far with legal skiing, and in doing so is not only clever but dishonest. The dishonesty that should be on the agenda. However, this will require a Trump administration willing to fight hard, but strictly enforce a powerful body of recent Supreme Court precedent.
You have to start now, with the transition. The word considered a cruel mistress, Horner agreed to provide more details about the transition and the Trump administration quickly revoked Biden’s “rule of law”, among other overreaches. Comments to the GAO included:
Politico reports that right-wing watchdog groups filed thousands of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests during the Biden era. As counsel in dozens of lawsuits about this request to the GAO and others, I have seen troves of records that, while often heavily redacted, but provide enough context to raise serious concerns and warrant further investigation. The Trump administration can review all of these records in their unredacted form to assess the appearance of malfeasance.
Agents are unlikely to cooperate. As part of the 2016 Trump transition “Landing Team,” I followed the prescribed process to request copies of certain off-the-record EPA records that had been released, in part, under FOIA. He seems well-suited to the work of the transition team that is putting together a plan for the incoming administrator. Career agency employees denied my request, and others.
Bureaucracy lost this control on inauguration day. This time there must be a commitment to follow through, immediately, to recognize this best chance to reverse the unlawful rule.
Unfortunately, this requires not only one lawyer in the office of the general counsel of each agency who is committed to recognizing that there is an error that requires recognition, but, just to be sure, also the company’s management, or IT, professional, who can reconstruct the excess removal.
What is important, according to Horner, is that Trump’s team knows that the Biden Clean Power Plan 2.0 is the main rule and will always be in the doctrine of the Main Question – possibly through a stay by SCOTUS in the first half of next year. year-Biden EPA’s “rules package” should not include all major rules unless lawyers convince courts to view them cumulatively, like the EPA. To do this, the challengers must seize on the joyous speech of EPA Administrator Michael Regan who admitted that he is pushing for a “rule set” to force exactly what SCOTUS has ruled. West Virginia v. EPA Agencies powerless to coerce: agency preferences for how Americans get electricity.
The EPA’s Regan acknowledged this goal publicly, and it appears others did as well in heavily redacted internal documents even though the Agency denied, in the rule, that there would be any power plant retirements. It is better to just take Regan at his word that this rule is a cumulative test in something the doctrine of the main question prohibits, and ask the court to accept his own statement.
The GAO disputed this in its amicus brief Kentucky v. EPAas should be challenging if they mean business. Meanwhile, the Trump administration must admit this mistake and target the cancellation of the rule, especially, because it violates the rule under the pretext.
related
