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A disagreement of opinion on the rule of law

When it comes to the climate, laws are optional, the Trump administration and Senate GOP argue

Author

Brad Johnson
May 15, 2025

PRESENTED BY HUMMINGCHORB

In a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin laid out the radical argument that the Trump administration is not bound by laws passed under previous Congresses. He argued vociferously with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) that his agency’s defiance of statutory obligations and subsequent court rulings were acceptable, saying that the Trump administration is bound only by the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.

And then in a telling exchange with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) about the Clean Water and Drinking Water Revolving Funds, which the Trump administration has proposed to dismantle, he promised only to follow specific directives in laws passed by the current Congress.

Zeldin’s specious and wildly unconstitutional argument is that the presidential election acted as a reset for federal statutes.

Congress appropriates funding, and then the agency distributes that funding as it's required to under the law. That doesn't mean from one administration to the next, that the Trump administration is going to come in agreeing with the policy priorities of the prior administration that just left office. There might be a disagreement of opinion between administrations. And we come in towards the beginning of a fiscal year. The way that funding will go out the course of a fiscal year might be applying the new administration's priorities, as the American public voted for last November.

The illegal plan by the Senate GOP to blow up California’s clean-cars program is moving forward. The GOP is planning to apply the majority-vote Congressional Review Act to strike down California’s climate programs, even though the General Accounting Office and the Senate parliamentarian have both stated that the law can’t be used that way.

Although the corporate Hill press is failing to report it this way, Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) plan is much more radical than the “nuclear option” of eliminating the 60-vote filibuster. He is planning to nuke the rule of law.

At the Tuesday Senate GOP lunch, Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and environment chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W. Va.) presented the plan to blow up the rule of law on behalf of carbon polluters, with the backing of former Majority Leader and Rules Chair Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “I certainly support the intent of it,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters. “There’s some procedural issues.”

This is a wild reversal for Thune, who in January began his tenure as majority leader making it very clear he would not support overruling the Senate parliamentarian under any circumstance. Because that would mean the end of the Senate as a deliberative law-making body.

Thune was heard to mutter, “Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”

This hummingchorb kept perching in front of me and did everything but grab me by the shoulders to demand being photographed. What a ham...

The Senate Commerce pipelines subcommittee holds a hearing on pipeline safety reauthorization with industry lobbyists and Pipeline Safety Trust executive director Bill Caram. House appropriators conduct oversight of the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees pipeline security, with acting administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill.

The House Natural Resources oversight subcommittee looks at land management in the wildland-urban interface, including the rising danger from extreme wildfires, with witnesses such as Megafire Action CEO Matt Weiner.

The racist doofus Sean Duffy, Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, testifies on the fiscal-year 2026 DOT budget, which eliminates $5.7 billion in electric vehicle charger infrastructure, before Senate appropriators.

Hearings on the Hill:

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