Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn't wasting any time finding ways to attack President Obama's efforts to fight climate change through more restrictive
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.
Those regulations, among other things, include targeted emission reductions from coal-fired plants in the states. They were also implemented by executive authority, which left Congress without much recourse. Coral Davenport has the details of McConnell's scheme:
Once enacted, the rules could shutter hundreds of coal-fired plants in what Mr. Obama has promoted as a transformation of the nation’s energy economy away from fossil fuels and toward sources like wind and solar power. Mr. McConnell, whose home state is one of the nation’s largest coal producers, has vowed to fight the rules.
So McConnell has put together a blueprint for states on how to mount a legal challenge to the new EPA regs.
On Thursday, Mr. McConnell sent a detailed letter to every governor in the United States laying out a carefully researched legal argument as to why states should not comply with Mr. Obama’s regulations.
McConnell's braintrust for this legal offensive has included an unusual ally—the influential constitutional law scholar, Harvard professor and early Obama endorser Laurence Tribe. Essentially, Tribe has advanced a similar legal argument about the EPA initiatives that die-hard conservatives are making about Obama's 2014 immigration actions—the president has exceeded his executive authority.
For more on the McConnell-Tribe collaboration, head below the fold.
Tribe made that case in a brief he was hired to write for Peabody Energy, which the New York Times reports just happens to be McConnell's fourth-largest campaign donor during his political career.
With the help of Tribe and others, McConnell has deployed an unusual national strategy right from his seat in the Senate that also aims to torpedo Obama's global efforts to stem climate change.
In addition to stopping state-level enactment of the climate rules, Mr. McConnell’s strategy is intended to undercut Mr. Obama’s position internationally as he tries to negotiate a global climate change treaty to be signed in Paris in December. The idea is to create uncertainty in the minds of other world leaders as to whether the United States can follow through on its pledges to cut emissions.
Kind of like Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-AR) misguided effort to destroy the administration's nuclear negotiations with Iran. Only McConnell has a brain, unfortunately.
How McConnell's efforts will play in the states remains to be seen, though it's easy to see any number of Republican governors hopping onboard.
While some governors oppose the climate change plan, others are preparing to comply. On Thursday, the National Governors Association announced that four states — Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Utah — would take part in a program to prepare to meet the climate-change regulations.
Perhaps most interesting in all of this is the role of Tribe, who reportedly likened Obama's EPA regs to "burning the Constitution" and will be representing Peabody Energy next month in the first federal court challenge to the new rules. Tribe was not only an early endorser of Obama's,
he also worked a nine-month stint at the Department of Justice in 2010. Apparently that didn't go so well, though
he said he left due to a medical condition.
Mr. Tribe was one of Mr. Obama’s earliest supporters, appearing in a campaign commercial and telling colleagues he hoped to work for him after the election. And, friends say, events in Mr. Tribe’s personal life — including a brain tumor and a divorce — heightened his desire to leave Cambridge for a while and to try something new: public service.
Mr. Obama himself made clear that he wanted to find a place for Mr. Tribe, according to interviews with administration officials who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. But for those putting together the staff, figuring out what to do with Mr. Tribe was difficult.
Admirers and detractors alike say that no law professor of his generation has had greater influence; many believe he would be a Supreme Court justice today had he not earned enduring Republican enmity by leading academic efforts to portray Robert H. Bork as an outside-the-mainstream conservative when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987.