BAH! WHO NEEDS ELECTRICITY, ANYWAY: An interesting case is coming up before SCOTUS, in which electrical grid operators have filed an unprecedented amici brief. The bottom line, as Just the News reports is:

“Organizations that manage, coordinate and monitor electricity service for 156 million Americans across 30 states are warning that the Biden-Harris administration’s power plant rule will be catastrophic for the nation’s grid.”

At the heart of the case is that the grid operators’ research says:

“[T]hey found a number of problems. The EPA grossly overestimated the ability of intermittent wind and solar to deliver reliable electricity during peak demand periods, according to the analysis, and it also found the agency didn’t perform any reliability analysis on the rules. The result would be blackouts lasting days in some cases.”

The question (for me, anyway) is will the same Court that flipped Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council remain steadfast in maintaining that “agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference.”

I’ve had my own run-ins in litigation against federal agencies (mostly in FOIA matters) and found maddening the argument that an agency could get away with simply saying “because we said so.”

If I had better Google-fu I’d insert that clip from one of the Sunday talk shows where during the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy mess, Harry Reid, in a remarkable example of body language, said essentially when the federal government says do something, you do it. Key was the image: while he said the words “federal government” he emphatically pointed at himself. Most telling.

I suspect that the enormous elasticity applied to “Chevron deference” might have been partially fueled by district court judges who, feeling overburdened, were only too happy to clear one more matter off of their dockets.

Worth keeping an eye on.

**If anyone can find that clip, please feel free to add it in comments and I’ll update this post.**