Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
Page Number: 74.0

18 

WEST VIRGINIA v. EPA 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

  Later, in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U. S. 
302 (2014), the Court relied on similar reasoning to reject 
EPA’s efforts to regulate “millions of small” and previously 
unregulated sources of emissions—“including retail stores,
offices, apartment buildings, shopping centers, schools, and 
churches.”  Id., at 328.  Key to that decision was the Court’s 
view  that  reading  the  delegation  so  expansively  would  be
“inconsistent with” the statute’s broader “structure and de-
sign.”  Id., at 321.  The Court explained that allowing the 
agency action to proceed would necessitate the “rewriting” 
of  other  “unambiguous  statutory  terms”—indeed,  of  “pre-
cise numerical thresholds.”  Id., at 321, 325–326.  (In quot-
ing one cryptic sentence of Utility Air as supporting its new
approach, see ante, at 19, the majority ignores the nine pre-
ceding  pages  of  analysis  of  the  statute’s  text  and  context,
see 573 U. S., at 315–324.) 

And last Term, the Court concluded that the Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lacked the power to 
impose a nationwide eviction moratorium.  Alabama Assn. 
of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 
U. S. ___, ___–___ (2021) (slip op., at 5–7).  The Court held 
that  other  statutory  language  made  it  a  “stretch”  to  read
the relied-on delegation as covering the CDC’s action.  Id., 
at ___ (slip op., at 6).  And the Court raised an eyebrow at 
the thought of the CDC “intrud[ing]” into “the landlord-ten-
ant  relationship”—a  matter  outside  the  CDC’s  usual  “do-
main.”  Ibid.4 

The  eyebrow-raise  is  indeed  a  consistent  presence  in
these  cases,  responding  to  something  the  Court  found
anomalous—looked at from Congress’s point of view—in a 

—————— 
healthcare pricing to an agency with “no expertise in crafting health in-
surance policy.”  576 U. S., at 486. 

4 Not every Justice, of course, agreed with the Court’s conclusions in 
the above-discussed cases; to be frank, I dissented in a couple.  But what 
matters here is the analysis those decisions undertook—and how, as I’ll
describe, it supports EPA’s Clean Power Plan.