The Supreme Court's Urgent Challenge to Congress

During the 1990’s, I became increasingly concerned about the growing evidence that our planet was warming and co-sponsored a series of bills to do something about the problem. Because I knew that nothing could pass without bipartisan support, I always sought and fortunately had Republican Senate cosponsors like John Chafee, John McCain, Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner. Sadly, we could never get enough votes to enact our proposals, even though we tried hard to negotiate acceptable compromises with colleagues and industries that were opposed. 

With each passing year, the problem of climate change became more threatening, and so, when President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency issued regulations in 2015 to limit global warming emissions from power plants based on the Clean Air Act (enacted in 1963, and substantially amended in 1990), I was very grateful and supportive.

Those Obama-era EPA regulations are the ones that were recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA, one of the transformative decisions the Court issued this term. In doing so, the Court majority presented an urgent new challenge to members of both parties in Congress and the White House to work together on legislation that can both enhance American energy security and address our growing climate challenge. If they don’t, after this court decision, no one else can.

The people who lead the great institutions of our national government have in recent years been unable to negotiate and collaborate with each other and to find centrist common ground on our biggest problems and opportunities. The cause is, of course, tribal partisanship and ideological rigidity to degrees unprecedented in American history.

Now, after the Supreme Court decision in the West Virginia case, neither disappointed citizens nor members of Congress can have any hope that the executive branch will sweep in to solve the problem that Congress could not, unless Congress has explicitly authorized such action in law. And that will be true not just regarding climate change and energy security but in every area of possible executive action, under presidents of both parties.

In this EPA decision, the Supreme Court has hit Congress with a judicial “two by four.” Unless members of both parties wake up and fulfill their responsibility under Article I of the Constitution, America’s problems will remain unsolved, and the people’s trust in our government, which is already dangerously low, will decline even more and threaten our great American experiment in self-government. The best hope for reform begins, as always in our democracy, with citizen voters who have the collective power to demand that their elected leaders put the national interest over partisan interests, personal or ideological. And then the elected leaders must make problem solving their priority instead of playing it safe to assure their re-election.

Throughout American history, going back to the Constitutional Convention itself, America’s best leaders have negotiated and compromised across factional or party lines to protect and improve our country. For example, after the Second World War, the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, and the Democratic President Harry Truman, worked together to create the great postwar institutions that protected global peace and security, and enabled unprecedented economic growth. In the 1960’s, President Johnson and Senator Dirksen collaborated to adopt the Civil Rights laws. In the 1980’s President Reagan and House Speaker O’Neil partnered to save Social Security from bankruptcy. And, in the 1990’s, President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich worked together to adopt a Balanced Budget Act which actually resulted in surpluses in the last three years of the Clinton presidency.

If these political odd couples could find common ground to produce such constructive and important results for our country, presidents and congresses in our time can do the same. After the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, they must as they are now America’s only hope to address climate change or just about any other problem the country has.

Joe Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989-2013, and is founding co-chair of No Labels.