AUSTIN –Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence and Director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment Kathleen Hartnett White issued the following statement on the lawsuit filed today by a Texas-led, 24-state coalition challenging the Clean Power Plan rule, published today in the Federal Register:
“Texans are fortunate that Attorney General Paxton has lead twenty-three other states to challenge EPA’s reckless Clean Power Plan in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Clean Power Plan is not merely another expensive EPA regulation. This rule to reduce CO2 is an arrogation of unprecedented federal authority to re-engineer the nation’s entire system of electric power- authority the U.S. Congress repeatedly refused to give to EPA.
“If upheld, EPA’s Clean Power Plan also would eviscerate state authority over electric utilities upheld since the 1930’s. Such federal commandeering of fundamental state authority violates bedrock constitutional principle. As Chief Justice Roberts stated in the Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, ‘The States are separate and independent sovereigns. Sometimes they have to act like it.’ Today’s challenge to EPA’s rogue seizure of a power to control electric power by a critical mass of all the states is essential to preserving our basic form of government as a constitutional democracy.”
The Honorable Kathleen Hartnett White is a distinguished senior fellow-in-residence and the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment. Former Chairman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (2001-2007).
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas.