Wasting No Time, Texas Rushes To Apply Health Care Ruling to EPA “Mandates”

A huge national law firm that the State of Texas has hired to represent it in various facets of its anti-EPA jihad has taken the rhetoric of the recent Supreme Court decision and is now attempting to apply it to federal environmental mandates.

According to an Energy and Environment article from last week,

"The focus for now is on part of the health care decision in which the court held, on a 7-2 vote, that the federal government cannot take away all of a state's Medicaid funding if it declines to implement new provisions that were introduced under the reform law. The court saw such a move as akin to coercion.

Congress cannot "penalize states that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

Lawyers at the Baker Hostetler law firm, which represents Texas, were clearly paying attention to the academic debate that immediately broke out, in which some scholars saw similarities between the Medicaid provisions in the health care law and how the federal government interacts with states over their role in enforcing the Clean Air Act via state implementation plans, known as SIPs."

Most legal scholars don't believe this will go anywhere, but this move is just more evidence that Governor Perry and Co. are still fighting the Civil War all over again.