{"id":22119,"date":"2014-12-29T12:03:07","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T17:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=22119"},"modified":"2014-12-29T12:03:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T17:03:07","slug":"liberal-harvard-law-prof-calls-obama%e2%80%99s-epa-%e2%80%9clawless%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/22119\/liberal-harvard-law-prof-calls-obama%e2%80%99s-epa-%e2%80%9clawless%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Harvard Law Prof Calls Obama\u2019s EPA \u201cLawless\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not every day that the leading liberal law professor in America calls out<\/a> the actions of the Obama Environmental Protection Agency as \u201clawless\u201d and \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA\u2019s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority,\u201d writes Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.<\/p>\n

The EPA is launching a \u201cClean Power Plan\u201d that will require state governments to enact restrictions on local electrical power plants in an effort to fight global climate change. As Tribe sees it, the EPA \u201cwould effectively dictate the energy mix used in each state and leave the state with essentially no choice in implementing its plan.\u201d Such an arrangement would violate numerous Supreme Court decisions that prohibit \u201cfederal commandeering of state governments\u201d because it \u201cdefeats political accountability and violates principles of federalism that are basic to our constitutional order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, this isn\u2019t the first time<\/a> President Obama has exceeded his constitutional authority to implement a controversial policy. It fits a pattern<\/a> of executive action unrestrained by seemingly any qualms over violating clear statutory limitations.<\/p>\n

And even though Tribe doesn\u2019t make the obvious analogy to ObamaCare\u2019s politically corrupt origin<\/a>, he doesn\u2019t pass up the opportunity to highlight what\u2019s really motivating the EPA\u2019s new regulatory scheme: \u201cThe brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate change legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation\u2019s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Change the author\u2019s byline and this article easily could be written by any constitutional conservative. Realizing that it comes instead from one of the leading proponents of the \u201cliving constitution\u201d school, and it\u2019s obvious that Obama & Co. are far beyond the boundaries of what even the most celebrated liberal academic scholar considers lawful executive action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not every day that the leading liberal law professor in America calls out the actions of the Obama Environmental Protection Agency as \u201clawless\u201d and \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d \u201cAfter studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA\u2019s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority,\u201d writes Harvard law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,3091,144,196,608,4635,300],"class_list":["post-22119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-climate","tag-constitution","tag-environment","tag-epa","tag-laurence-tribe","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22119"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22123,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22119\/revisions\/22123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}