Chief Justice Rejects Effort to Block EPA

In a victory for the Obama administration, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. earlier this month refused to block an EPA regulation that limits emissions of mercury from coal-fired power plants.

The decision came three weeks after the full Supreme Court blocked another major Obama administration rule that would limit planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution from coal plants.

Opponents of Obama’s environmental policies were buoyed by the high court’s earlier decision to halt the global warming rule, known as the Clean Power Plan, reading it as a sign that the court was willing to halt other regulations while they undergo changes and review.

Legal experts, however, said the chief justice’s decision suggested otherwise.

“This is a pretty strong way of sending a signal that the fact that the court granted a stay of the Clean Power Plan was highly extraordinary, and they don’t want to be inundated with these,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell and a deputy administrator of the EPA in the George W. Bush administration.

Chief Justice Roberts did not refer the question to the full court.

“You know if Justice Scalia, rest his soul, if he had been there, that would have been a conservative voice that possibly got at least the Supreme Court to hear the case,” Texas Farm Bureau President Russell Boening said.

In the order, the chief justice rejected an application from 20 states that said a federal appeals court had effectively thwarted their victory in the Supreme Court in June, when justices ruled that the EPA ailed to consider the punishing costs of its mercury regulation.

Only weeks after the death of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, rural Americans who feared a pummeling by the Obama administration’s environmental rules are feeling the blows.

The Supreme Court also has declined to hear the American Farm Bureau Federation’s challenge to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan, which involves an EPA-imposed “diet” on nutrient and sediment runoff for thousands of farms, municipalities, and other entities in the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake watershed. S