Not long after their party regained control of the lower chamber in the midterm elections, House Democratic leaders unveiled their signature legislative action for the next Congress – a package of reform measures aimed at tackling some of the worst ethics abuses involving the Trump administration's top officials and members of Congress. Symbolically assigned the designation of H.R. 1 to underscore its status as the top legislative priority, the bill would do more than just restore the integrity of our key democratic institutions; it could also serve as a crucial first step toward strengthening our system of regulatory safeguards.

Though the actual language of H.R. 1 has not been released, the bill is expected to consist of three sections. First, it would introduce a number of ethics reforms aimed at high-ranking executive branch officials and members of Congress, including requiring presidential candidates to disclose their taxes …

It's that point in the year when we take a step back and reflect on the past 12 months. This was a big year for those concerned about restoring the Chesapeake Bay, with plenty of feel-good stories about various species and ecosystems rebounding more quickly than expected. There were also more than a few headlines about record-setting rainfalls washing trash down the rivers, over dams, and coating the Bay's shores. But I am going to look beneath the headlines at what is driving – or hindering – our progress in restoring the Bay and where things stand now that we're just past the halfway mark in the current Bay cleanup framework. So, in no particular order, here are the top 10 stories and issues I've been watching this year, which I'll expand upon in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

10) States Began to Craft Their …

Originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog.

This morning, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA released a proposed new rule that would change the agencies' shared definition of "waters of the United States." That phrase defines the geographic scope of federal jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act. 

The proposed rule would narrow the scope of federal jurisdiction, primarily in two ways.  First, it would eliminate jurisdiction for "ephemeral" streams – that is, streams where water flows only during and shortly after precipitation events. Second, it would eliminate jurisdiction for wetlands that lack an intermittent or permanent surface connection to navigable-in-fact waterways and that are not directly adjacent to those waterways. In practice, this will mean removing protections for wetlands that are close to surface waterways and are connected to those surface waterways through groundwater flows.

In the rule itself, and in the rhetoric surrounding …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

In terms of regulatory policy, the second half of Trump's term is shaping up to look a lot like Obama's final two years in office. Congress won't be doing much to advance Trump's environment and energy agenda, as was the case with Obama. So, like Obama, Trump's focus will be on administrative action, particularly regulatory initiatives (or deregulatory ones, in Trump's case). The big question is how these efforts will fare in court. I want to discuss three aspects of that question: timing, judicial review of statutory issues, and judicial review of policy analysis.

Timing. The Trump people are keenly aware that some of Obama's most important rules were still in the litigation process when he left office, which has kept those rules hanging in the wind for the two years since Trump took office. They seem desperate to avoid the same fate …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

This is the second of three posts assessing the first two years of the Trump administration. You can read the first post here.

We all seem to be subscribed to the "All Trump News, All the Time" newsfeed. It may be helpful to step back a bit and compare Trump with his last Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

How do the two stack up? Bush and Trump were very different in character and style, but their regulatory aims were similar. Bush and Trump were both trying to steer the country in the same directions in terms of regulatory policy: increased use of fossil fuels, less environmental regulation. But the Republican Party has been radicalized since Bush's day, and in environmental affairs, the Trump administration reflects that radicalization.

For instance, whereas Bush actually created important ocean national monuments (though it was a bit out …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

In September 2017 – that seems so long ago! – Eric Biber and I released a report assessing the state of play in environmental issues 200 days into the Trump administration, based on an earlier series of blog posts. As we end Trump's second year, it's time to bring that assessment up to date. This is the first of three posts examining what Trump has done (and hasn't done) in terms of environment and energy.

For this first post, I'll follow the same outline as the 9/17 report but omit a lot of the detail.

Legislation. Eric and I considered substantive legislative changes very unlikely although potentially very damaging. Almost no substantive changes have made it through Congress. The one exception was the provision in the Senate tax bill for opening up ANWR for drilling, which was able to use reconciliation procedures since it …

This post was originally published on SCOTUSblog. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US).

In a mixed-bag ruling, a unanimous Supreme Court returned Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to decide several questions not answered on the first go-round. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court appears calculated to decide just enough to justify shipping the case back to the lower court.

The case involves the Fish and Wildlife Service’s designation, under the Endangered Species Act, of property in Louisiana as "critical habitat" for the dusky gopher frog. The frog has not lived on this property for many years, but the service concluded that the property was essential to the conservation of the frog – and thus appropriately deemed critical habitat – because it contains high-quality …

In 2017, President Trump signed a proclamation reducing by about 85 percent the size of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, a large landscape of pristine red rock canyons and culturally and historically significant Native American sites. He claimed that he had the authority to shrink this and any other national monument under the Antiquities Act of 1906 and had previously ordered the Department of the Interior to review additional monuments whose designations stretch back decades.

But does federal law really allow the president to "repeal and replace" our national monuments once they're established?

In a recent amicus brief that Professor Bob Anderson (University of Washington) and I filed with 11 other legal scholars, we answer that question with a resounding "no." The plain and clear text of the Antiquities Act is intentionally narrow, authorizing the president to establish national monuments to protect "historic landmarks, historic …

Originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

Like many areas of law, energy policy in the United States is both national and local. The boundary lines delineating federal and state authority are not always clear, leading to tension and disagreement between federal and state authorities. When tensions get too high, Congress can, and often has, stepped in to override state control in order to promote national interests. But when Congress faces partisan gridlock, an increasing number of disputes are resolved in the courts.

Over the past century, Congress has slowly carved out significant swaths of energy policy for federal control: oil and natural gas exports; automobile fuel economy standards; interstate transmission of electricity; permitting approval and eminent domain for interstate natural gas pipelines; and permitting approval for hydropower facilities and nuclear facilities. But much activity remains under state control: approval of interstate and intrastate oil …