DAVID BLACKMON: Endangerment Finding Rescission Ends Series Of Legal Perversions

President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin formally announced the rescission of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases Thursday, a move that was immediately met by a hail of criticism from climate activists and their enablers in the legacy media. But, as the President pointed out during the press conference, that Obama-era finding “had no basis whatsoever in the law,” and thus had to go.

That Endangerment Finding came about via a series of perversions of the U.S. legal system that began more than 40 years ago, the results of which the Trump administration is now systematically unwinding. In an interview with CBS News following Thursday’s press conference, Zeldin specifically referred to “the Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright” as one of the key events that led to the rescission. That July 2024 decision in a case styled Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo revoked a perversion of the legal system from 1984 referred to as the Chevron Deference, a doctrine that for 40 years forced federal courts to defer to the judgments of regulatory agencies when they interpret their own authority under federal statutes.

As I pointed out here when that decision was rendered, unelected bureaucrats eager to expand the scope of their political powers have too often rendered interpretations that were in no way reasonable, and that fall far outside the original intent of Congress. That was what happened in 2009, when EPA’s bureaucrats made what Zeldin called “all sorts of mental leaps” to define carbon dioxide, i.e., plant food, as a pollutant under the provisions of the Clean Air Act to justify their Endangerment Finding.

In doing so, Obama’s EPA referenced the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in the case styled Massachusetts v. EPA as its empowering authority. But that decision was rendered by a different court with a liberal majority at a time when the Chevron Deference was in full force.

It was all a perversion of the law from the beginning – not about science, not about the law, but about pure, raw politics. In the U.S. legal system, one perversion of the law inevitably leads to another.