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2022-08-11 Home Front: Politix
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We May Have Dodged A Bullet In The Misnamed ‘Inflation Reduction Act’
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by Francis Menton
[ManhattanContrarian] On Sunday (August 7) the Senate passed the 700+ page bill with the Orwellian name of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The bill has essentially nothing to do with supposedly reducing inflation, and is really just a conventional tax-and-spend extravaganza, with hundreds of billions of dollars of completely counterproductive taxing on the one hand, and even larger amounts of equally counterproductive and wasteful spending on the other hand. The bill is still not final, since it differs substantially from a version previously passed by the House. So it may be a while before there is an enacted statute. But now that the main hurdle of Senate passage has been cleared, there probably will be a statute within days, in all likelihood identical to what the Senate has passed.
This is one of the very worst bills ever to clear a house of Congress, although to be fair the (equally misnamed) Build Back Better bill passed by the House toward the end of last year was much larger and would have been even worse. But from information coming to me, it appears that the very most destructive provision of the proposed bill got scrapped at the last minute, just prior to Senate passage. That was a provision that would have attempted to substantially undo the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in West Virginia v. EPA. Although the bill is not final, and I cannot find definitive information at the time of this writing, it appears likely that we have dodged a huge bullet, at least for the moment.
Some background: the West Virginia v. EPA case concerned a challenge by many (red) states to an attempt by the EPA to transform the electricity generation sector of the economy, and impose hundreds of billions of dollars of costs on the American public, on the basis of the thinnest of statutory pretexts. The particular statutory pretext on which EPA relied was found in Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court held that that provision was insufficiently clear and specific, under the Court’s Major Questions Doctrine, to support the economic transformation that EPA was attempting to accomplish:
In arguing that Section 111(d) empowers it to substantially restructure the American energy market, EPA “claim[ed] to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power” representing a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority.” . . . It located that newfound power in the vague language of an “ancillary provision[]” of the Act, . . . one that was designed to function as a gap filler and had rarely been used in the preceding decades. And the Agency’s discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously and repeatedly declined to enact itself. . . . Given these circumstances, there is every reason to “hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant to confer on EPA the authority it claims under Section 111(d).
Thus the effect of West Virginia v. EPA was to stymie the Administrative State, at least for the moment, in its efforts to transform the economy without clear Congressional authority. But the Supreme Court left open the possibility that Congress could enact a new statute granting to EPA the authority that it had just been found to lack. It was obvious that a top priority of the Democrats was going to be to try to get something into the reconciliation bill that could be used to argue that EPA had been unleashed.
Read the rest at the link 
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Posted by badanov 2022-08-11 00:00||
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Posted by Glenmore 2022-08-11 01:05||
2022-08-11 01:05||
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