As we come upon the nation’s birthday The Supreme Court gave the country a huge birthday present – the ability of polluters (read corporations) to pollute to their heart’s content with little to stop them. Take a deep breath – with a mask on if you are in a crowd. It may be the last clean breath we get.

If you missed it, the SCOTUS ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) does not have power to issue regulations on the environment. They only have power to enforce regulations that Congress passed. Environmental sciences is so vast, so complex and so intricate that few in congress would have the expertise to create regulations. Not to mention that the reactionary Republicans would try to block any regulation anyway.

This essentially pretty much neuters the EPA and will open the US to massive polluting. Or at least that is the way I under stand it. If you are young, if you have children, if you have grandchildren, all these folks’ future just got very scary.

 A tweet from Paul Krugman:

Undoing Roe is awful. Kneecapping environmental regulation is existential. This Supreme Court has just come down on the side of civilizational collapse.

The only way to overrule this decision and all the other gawd-awful decisions of probably the worst Court in our history is for congress to act – very, very unlikely – or for congress to set rules for the Supreme Court and increase the numbers on the Court. That is very unlikely also. 

So until we see some movement to reign in the Court I suspect we are stuck with with this horrible decision, the horrible Dobbs decision, the horrible Bruen v. New York decision on carrying guns. Even more than that, we can expect that next year will be be even worse. We already know that there will be a case that will decide if a state legislature can override the popular vote and cast the state’s electoral votes for whom the legislature decides. Pretty much ends democracy.

Once more this mid-term election just became the most important in the history of the country. Republicans must be voted out of office and replaced with good Democrats. If we do not do that this may be the last viable election we have in this country.

This is truly a scary time.