SCOTUS Sophistry
I am putting together our next Current Events session here at MC and I decided it was good to look at decisions made by SCOTUS in the past year. Not because they are good decisions (they aren’t) but because they illustrate how SCOTUS, now with a Trump-created conservative majority, is taking it upon themselves to be the experts in areas of science and medicine. They are doing this, of course, because of ideology, not because they suddenly got a Ph.D. or an M.D. In 2007, SCOTUS ruled that the EPA had authority to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. It was not until 2015, however, that the EPA directed states to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Several states (notably West Virginia) and the coal industry immediately filed suit. In 2016, SCOTUS then blocked the Clean Power Plan which was then (surprise!) scrapped by the Trump administration. In their decision of 30 June 2022 , SCOTUS gave the reason that the so-called “major questions doctr