Is What Went Before Enough to Save U.S. Climate Policy?
The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean but what it meant when it was adopted.
Justice Antonin Scalia
Last week a copy of a DRAFT majority opinion overturning the 1973 abortion rights case of Roe v Wade found its way into the hands of Politico and onto to the front pages of almost every newspaper and social media site in the land. The leak was an appalling act that struck at the heart of our democratic republic when faith in government is already at a low point.
The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has to do with a Mississippi law called the “Gestational Age Act,” which prohibits all abortions, with few exceptions, after 15 weeks’ gestational age. It’s one in a long line of efforts by conservatives challenging the 1973 Roe decision that made abortion a right covered by the U.S. Constitution.
What does a case on abortion have to do with U.S. climate policy? Factually, not much. But the willingness of a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to overthrow established precedence in one fell-swoop may mean that Massachusetts v EPA — the bedrock on which federal regulation of carbon and other harmful…
