Analysis: Trump’s pick for EPA has been Obama’s worst nightmare

By Amber Phillips

The Washington Post

The last six years of President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda can pretty much be summed up like this: Obama proposes something new to Congress, and it says no. He tries to go around Congress by implementing rules via his administration, only to get sued by Republican attorneys general. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And in recent years, those Republican attorneys general have played a critical role in blocking the president’s attempts to regulate climate change, deportations and Wall Street. In some cases, they’ve even managed to block a top Obama priority entirely, or, at the very least, get it bogged down in courts in time to elect a Republican president who will simply undo it — and with it, Obama’s legacy.

Perhaps no attorney general epitomizes the statewide lawyers who have stymied Obama more than Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Since getting elected in 2010, Pruitt has dedicated much of his career to putting up roadblocks to Obama. He filed the first lawsuit challenging Obamacare, he sat in the front row for Supreme Court arguments about it, and he has led numerous other lawsuits against the Obama administration. I can’t think of a clearer visual than Pruitt’s Linked In profile, which, as my Washington Post colleagues covering his nomination note, literally boasts of him being “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

Pruitt has even twice sued the agency he wants to lead, once to stop regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector and once to stop regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector.

He has also joined other GOP attorneys general in a bevy of other lawsuits against the Obama administration, among them: to try to stop Obama’s deportation protections, to try to prevent Obamacare from requiring religious employers to provide contraception, or to try to lighten Dodd-Frank financial reform.

All told, dozens of Republican attorneys general have joined lawsuits to sue the Obama administration for implementing regulations. “I guess we’re getting used to getting sued,” then-White House senior counselor John Podesta told The Washington Post in February 2015. And in some pretty high-stakes battles, the lawsuits have worked:

In June 2015, the Supreme Court decided that the EPA overstepped its bounds by requiring coal-burning power plants to reduce toxic mercury emissions without first considering how much it would cost. Coal industry groups and 21 states launched the legal challenge, including Pruitt’s.

In 2015, Pruitt led the effort by a group of attorneys general in 18 states to temporarily block the EPA’s attempts to expand its oversight of water pollution, a regulation he’d be in position to essentially kill in his new perch at the agency.

In February, the Supreme Court blocked Obama’s Clean Power Plan to limit emissions in the country’s electric-power sector, which emits 30 percent to 40 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gases. The case was brought by officials in more than two dozen states, with Pruitt leading the charge.

In June and in October, the Supreme Court decided not to revive Obama’s plan to shield from deportation millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally, which had been stalled by a federal appeals court after — you guessed it — 26 state AGs sued, among them Pruitt.

Those are just the victories; there were plenty of other GOP-led attorneys general lawsuits out there. In May, Texas filed an 11-state lawsuit to stop Obama’s directive to let transgender students use public school bathrooms that match their gender identity. Pruitt was, of course, among them.

Pruitt apparently feels so strongly about the role of attorneys general in blocking the Obama administration that he has created a kind of club in Oklahoma — the “Federalism Unit” — to try to better organize those efforts.

Pruitt bristles at allegations that he’s playing politics with these lawsuits.

“The cases that I’m involved in as attorney general … the narrative on the left, the narrative with respect to our opponents is that we’re simply engaging in political exercise,” Pruitt said in a February address to the Federalist Society. ” … The opposite is true. It is a very important time to be attorney general, because this is about the rule of law, things that are much more transcendent in my view than whether we agree or disagree with the policy aspirations of the Affordable Care Act.”

But the reason Pruitt and his colleagues have had so much success is largely thanks to politics. During Obama’s presidency, Republicans have dominated state politics, perhaps nowhere as successfully as in attorney general positions.

In November, Republicans picked up two attorney general seats, growing their ranks to 29, which is more than at any time in U.S. history, according to the Republican Attorneys General Association. For the last two years of his presidency, Obama has had to deal with a Republican Congress and more Republican governors, state lawmakers and attorneys general than at any time since the Great Depression.

That means Republicans have had more tools at their disposal to block the president’s agenda. One of the most powerful tools has been the efforts of Republican attorneys general, and perhaps no attorney general has been more enthusiastic about those efforts than Pruitt.