EPA, do us all a favor and don't pick favorites

President Trump's administration is killing one of former President Barack Obama's most dangerous overreaches, the Clean Power Plan. Federal law as currently interpreted won't let the administration stop there. The Environmental Protection Agency will probably need to replace the plan. This needs to be done with care, and warily, for there will be much special pleading for favors by different industries, and many legal pitfalls.

You may recall when Democrats lost control of Senate after the 2014 elections, Obama belittled Congress and boasting that he'd go around it with executive orders — his "a pen and a phone." The next year, his EPA issued the Clean Power Plan, seeking to impose by fiat what even a Democratic Congress had rejected, regulating greenhouse gas emissions by power plants.

After the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2009, Senate Democrats, even with a 60-vote supermajority, couldn't get the bill across the finish line.

Instead, Obama leaned on the Supreme Court ruling inMassachusetts v. EPAwhich found somehow that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Through the 2015 Clean Power Plan the Obama administration implemented that ruling, but not by actually regulating emissions from power plants. The rule created a complex scheme whereby utilities had to come up with various ways to mitigate or minimize emissions from the power sources on which they relied.

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