Posted on August 29, 2012 by Andrea Field
The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (Transport Rule) [76 Fed. Reg. 48208] adopted by EPA in mid-2011 — requires sources in the eastern U.S. to reduce their emissions substantially. Numerous states and industry groups challenged the rule in the D.C. Circuit, and many of the petitioners asked the court to stay the rule pending litigation. One motions panel of the court stayed the Transport Rule in late 2011, and then a subsequent panel directed that all briefing in the case be completed — and oral argument be held — within approximately 100 days after the stay was issued.
That the case was put on such a tight briefing schedule led many litigants to speculate that the court wanted to resolve the case quickly and would issue its decision within 60 days of the April 13, 2012 oral argument. When mid-June came and went with no decision, many of those same litigants then predicted the decision would come by mid-July so as not to interfere with the judges’ summer vacations. In support of their mid-July prediction, they also claimed that the head of EPA’s Air Office, Gina McCarthy, agreed with them. In early July, Ms. McCarthy had indeed told some state regulators that the court would issue its decision on Friday, July 13, but she had quickly added that her prediction should not be taken too seriously because she had been wrongly predicting the imminent issuance of the decision for the past thirty days. Nonetheless, several in the media reported her prediction as gospel, prompting all involved to stay glued to the D.C. Circuit’s website on Friday, July 13.
As one of those waiting for the court to issue its opinion on the Transport Rule, I was reminded of a similar waiting game in which I was involved in 1997. In May of that year, I had argued a case before a three-judge panel in the Fourth Circuit, where I had found one judge to be sympathetic to my argument, one judge to be antagonistic (but nicely so, because this was the Fourth Circuit after all), and the third judge to be a cipher. As soon as oral argument ended, my client started bombarding me daily with the same question: when would the court issue its decision? I couldn’t answer that question (no matter how often I was asked), but I thought retired Fourth Circuit Judge James Marshall Sprouse might have insights into the court’s decision-making process. He had been gracious enough – and patient enough — to help me prepare for oral argument in my case (and to help me persuade the client to eliminate some of the more bombastic points from the argument).
Gamely consulting his crystal ball and taking into account that the case had been argued so late in the term, Judge Sprouse suggested that (1) if there was no dissent, then the court might issue its decision by the end of July; (2) if one judge dissented, then there might be a delay of another one to two months; and (3) if each of the three judges wrote a separate opinion or if one of the jurists was trying to be Solomon-esque — finding areas of agreement and areas of disagreement with each of the other two judges on the panel — then there might not be a decision until well into the fall. Judge Sprouse was spot on in my case: the decision — which fell into Category 3 — was issued in late October 1997.
Back to the present now. The D.C. Circuit issued its decision on the Transport Rule on August 21, 2012. In an opinion by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Judge Thomas Griffith, the court held that the Transport Rule exceeds EPA’s statutory authority in two respects, by (1) requiring upwind states to reduce emissions by more than their own significant contributions to nonattainment in other states, and (2) failing to allow states the initial opportunity to implement the emission reductions required by the Transport Rule. Judge Rogers wrote a stinging dissent.
I leave it to my ACOEL colleague Dave Flannery and his more detailed description of the decision below. I will add only that although Judge Sprouse passed away eight years ago, the timing of the decision was just what he might have predicted.
Tags: CSAPR, EPA, Transport Rule, Air, cross-state air pollution