Advancing American Freedom led an amicus brief with 39 other amici in Diamond Alternative v. EPA urging the Supreme Court to grant certiorari and find that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot grant one State an exemption to act as an alternative national legislature for environmental regulation. Yet that is exactly what it has done. Congress allowed the EPA to grant states waivers to address unique and specific local issues. California is seeking to use that exemption to address global climate change. Because other states can only either follow the EPA’s regulations or California’s, this system allows California to set an alternative national standard. California, in turn, based its standard not on its unique local needs but on its agenda-driven desire to fight global climate change.
“While sending more power back to the states is generally a good thing, allowing one state, and the most regulatorily minded of states at that, to have special power that is denied to every other state, to set alternative regulatory standards for the nation is not American federalism,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “The Supreme Court must take this case and limit the California exemption to the problem Congress intended to solve; California specific environmental dangers.”
Read the full brief here.
