Texas’ top attorney is making the case that the Supreme Court risks undermining its own recent rulings to limit agency powers if it agrees to take up a battle over federal approval for a temporary nuclear waste storage facility in the Lone Star State.
State Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, filed a brief last week urging the justices to reject a petition from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeking to restore its authorization of an above-ground, privately owned storage facility in Texas’ Permian Basin.
He said that overturning a decision last year by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that scrapped the NRC permit — as the federal government has asked the justices to do — would run afoul of the high court’s decisions this summer in Corner Post v. Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve System, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy and Loper Bright v. Raimondo.
The three rulings struck a series of consecutive blows to federal agency power. Corner Post gave parties more time to sue over federal rules, Jarkesy made it harder for federal regulators to handle legal matters internally, and Loper Bright ended the Chevron doctrine, which for 40 years had said that judges should defer to agencies’ reasonable readings of ambiguous laws.
