What do these things have in common?
- The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan
- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
- The EPA’s Waters of the United States
- The Guidance Letter from the Department of Justice and the Department of Education
Each of them is a regulation issued by one of the branches of the federal government that oversteps the boundaries of what Congress has enacted into law. In each case, an executive branch department, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Education, has created a policy or regulation that goes beyond what was intended when Congress passed a law, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act or Title IX.
In each of these cases, the state of Georgia, through its Attorney General Sam Olens, has filed or joined a lawsuit intended to preserve the principle that Congress makes laws that the president and executive branch of government carry out. While an argument can be made that these regulations interfere with states’ rights under the tenth amendment, the Attorney General’s argument is that the regulations are unconstitutional based on the separation of powers delineated in Article I and Article II of the Constitution.
The most recent of these, is the lawsuit challenging the directives in the guidance letter. Take a closer read of Olens’s statement announcing Georgia was going to join in the Texas lawsuit:
The guidance letter is yet another example of the President’s unconstitutional overreach. The Constitution gives only Congress the power to write and rewrite laws. Threatening to withhold taxpayer dollars from schools if they don’t comply with this new and legally unsound mandate is unconstitutional. I will continue to defend the Constitution on behalf of Georgians.
Olens’s message said nothing about the T word or the B word. Instead, it was all about the C word.