Fall Reception: State AG's & Federalism

State Attorneys General & Federalism: using the power of attorneys general to fight federal overreach.

Both major party candidates for Attorney General in Arizona have said they will sue the Environmental Protection Agency over new rules to reduce carbon emissions from power plants if the requirements for Arizona aren’t amended.  In recent years, state attorneys general have lead many lawsuits against the federal government.  Most famously, at least 27 of them sued to stop the Affordable Care Act.  But state AG's also sued the EPA to require regulation of greenhouse gasses in Massachusetts v. EPA, and different state AG's sued the EPA to challenge the regulations promulgated in the wake of that case in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA.  Thus state attorneys general seem to be taking an ever-larger role in challenging (but also supporting) federal regulatory power.

Mr. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.  He is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights of the Justice Department.