INTERVIEW: West Virginia vs. the Woke Administrative State with Attorney General Patrick Morrisey
Plus my hit with Jesse Waters on Deep State-Big Tech Collusion
West Virginia’s AG Takes On the Administrative State
Montani Semper Liberi, Latin for “Mountaineers Are Always Free,” is West Virginia’s motto. To that motto, the Mountain State’s attorney general would like to add a coda: “Where woke policies and federal overreach go to die.” This is the stated aim of Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia’s thrice-elected Republican chief legal officer, soon to be entering his 10th year in office, as he revealed in a recent interview.
Morrisey has gone about pursuing that aim through engaging in sustained litigation against the federal government, jousting with the executive branch particularly over its embrace under the Obama and Biden administrations of ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance – principles, and their efforts to codify and impose them by administrative fiat.
Morrisey’s rise to ESG and administrative state scourge, which began, in a classic twist of political fate, with a loss 22 years ago in a four-way Republican primary for the U.S. House in New Jersey (a race in which this reporter’s father also competed), reached an apex of sorts in June. After years of legal wrangling, Morrisey scored a victory at the Supreme Court in the case of West Virginia v. EPA.
That ruling struck a blow against the EPA in its bid to radically alter America’s electricity generation mix from coal to alternatives, and against the power of the administrative state itself. The Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia’s favor on “major questions” grounds. Under that doctrine, as the high court described it, should an agency pursue a policy of substantial “economic and political significance,” it “must point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the authority it claims.”
The EPA, in West Virginia, and the Court’s view, did not satisfy these conditions.
In theory, a whole raft of significant regulatory policies across the executive branch could now be challenged under the major questions doctrine. The durability of that theory is likely to be put to the test amid a amounting backlash against ESG-related regulatory policies that executive agencies have been promulgating under the Biden administration – part-and-parcel of a broader revolt against ESG in government and corporate America being led by the states and poised to be joined by the incoming Republican House.
West Virginia and like-minded states argue that the Biden administration is once again running afoul of the major questions doctrine with regulatory efforts from agencies even further unmoored from ESG matters like climate, from the SEC to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
I conducted an interview with Attorney General Morrisey to discuss these and related issues, which you can read in full at RealClearPolitics.