A federal judge late Wednesday temporarily blocked a Trump administration effort to overturn California’s clean car rules through Congress.
Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of former President Obama, blocked an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) move that would have allowed Congress and President Trump to overturn California rules related to vehicle and lawn equipment emissions.
In years past, the EPA allowed these regulations to move forward by granting waivers that exempted them from the Clean Air Act’s preemption of state laws that are stricter than federal standards.
In June, the agency classified these waivers as “rules,“ an effort to let Congress overturn them using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows lawmaker to nix recently passed rules with simple majority votes and presidential approval.
“The central problem for EPA is that the waivers themselves explicitly state that they are not rules, while the CRA limits invocation of this statute only to agency rules of general applicability, which EPA, in its own words, has emphatically stated Clean Air Act waiver orders are not,” Howell wrote in her ruling.
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