Domestic environment and foreign policy

Check out Cymie R. Payne's ASIL Insight respecting the Massachusetts v. EPA decision on which we've posted here and here. Her focus is not the Supreme Court's administrative-law-based ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must revisit its refusal to regulate greenhouse gases. Rather, she examines another legal theory, which the EPA invoked in vain in Massachusetts: "that somehow a regulatory action by an executive agency under a federal statute, with no direct link to security or international trade, might inhibit the President's prerogative to direct foreign policy." Given that like arguments have been made in other, pending litigation, Payne concludes that the roles of the branches of federal government, and of agencies of constituent states, are likely to evolve.