How Antonin Scalia’s Ghost Could Block
Donald Trump’s Wall
By DANIEL HEMEL, JONATHAN
MASUR and ERIC POSNER
The New York Times JAN. 25, 2017
President Trump may stumble on an unexpected obstacle as he
tries to build a wall along the Mexican border: Antonin Scalia.
This may seem surprising,
considering that Mr. Trump has called him a “great” justice. But in one of his
last opinions, Justice Scalia supplied a powerful weapon to resist Mr. Trump’s
plans for a border wall.
Justice Scalia’s June 2015
opinion in Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency may not seem helpful at first sight.
It blocked an E.P.A. rule that would have limited mercury emissions from power
plants. The Clean Air Act instructs the E.P.A. to issue “appropriate and
necessary” regulations, and Justice Scalia said that language required the
E.P.A. to consider the costs of its proposed rules, which it did not properly
do. “No regulation is ‘appropriate’ if it does significantly more harm than
good,” Justice Scalia wrote. And even though the final vote in the case was
5-4, all nine members of the court agreed that the E.P.A. could not ignore the
costs of its actions when deciding whether or how stringently to regulate.
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