Paris is Copenhagen all over again — more presidential climate change grandstanding without concrete results.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. & ANDREW M. GROSSMAN, 10 December 2015 in USA Today

The world is watching as diplomats in Paris hammer out the final details of a new climate agreement involving over 150 countries. The goal, said President Barack Obama, is “an agreement where … each nation has the confidence that other nations are meeting their commitments.”

But the world’s attention may be misplaced. There is no reason to believe that this agreement will conclude any differently from the last three, with nations reneging on commitments to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and to provide billions of dollars in foreign aid to finance reductions in the developing world.

That’s a big problem for the president: reciprocity has always been Congress’s chief concern when it comes to climate-related measures that threaten to drive up energy prices and sap the United States’ international competitiveness. The lack of binding commitments for developing nations like China and India is a big part of what killed consideration of one previous agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, in the Senate. And that, as well as general opposition to new greenhouse emissions regulations by congressional Republicans, presages the same result in Congress this time around.

Despite the messaging coming from the White House, as a legal matter, the president actually does need Congress’s support to complete any kind of meaningful deal. That legal reality is having serious consequences in Paris, where U.S. participation in the final deal is an overriding imperative. For one, it rules out any firm financial commitments. The Constitution, after all, assigns the power of the purse to Congress, and so the president cannot, on his own, set the U.S. foreign aid budget for years into the future. Read more »

The Supreme Court may soon end racial discrimination disguised as ‘diversity.’

by DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. & ANDREW GROSSMAN, December 8, 2015, in the National Review

The don’t-ask-don’t-tell era of racial preferences in college admissions may soon be at an end, as Abigail Fisher’s challenge to the University of Texas’s affirmative-action program makes its second appearance before the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this Wednesday. 

Significantly, Ms. Fisher isn’t asking the Court to ban affirmative action. Instead, her case seeks to hold schools to the general rule that the government may employ race-based measures only as a last resort. And even then, such measures must be almost perfectly calibrated to serve a compelling interest — in this instance, achieving the educational benefits of diversity.

In the admissions context, those principles have too often been honored in the breach. And for that, blame the Court. Its 2003 decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative-action program combined the tough language typical of decisions reviewing race-conscious government policies with a loose and open-ended analysis of the way the program actually worked and the way it was justified.

University administrators took the decision as license to do what they pleased, never mind necessity or tailoring, so long as they stayed vague about the way their programs worked. Admissions at UT–Austin offer a case in point. In 2008, the year Ms. Fisher applied, the bulk of students (81 percent) were admitted under Texas’s Top Ten Percent law, which grants automatic admission to top students at Texas high schools. That alone made UT–Austin one of the most racially diverse campuses among elite public universities. Read more »

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Andrew M. Grossman — 22 June 2015 in USA Today

Constitutional law isn’t all conflict. It may seem that way as the Supreme Court barrels along to the conclusion of another term, with contentious cases concerning same-sex marriage, Obamacare, and seemingly every other issue plucked from the headlines. But the high-profile controversies obscure that, as much as the Supreme Court may be divided, the justices are able to come together on a great many important issues.

For example, raisins. Yes, those tiny wrinkled morsels. The tiny snacks are also the subject of a major challenge to government power — one that has revealed surprising agreement on the Court.

Marvin and Laura Horne have been growing raisins for 40 years on their family’s California farmland. After they decided to dry the raisins for themselves, rather than sell their grapes to a processor, they found themselves in the cross hairs of the federal government, facing fines of nearly a million dollars.

Their crime? Refusing to allow the government to seize over a million pounds​ of the raisins they had grown and processed themselves.

It is the dirty little secret of American agriculture that raisins and other crops, despite being produced by private parties, are actually under the control of the federal government, which colludes with major producers to fix prices and control the market.

These so-called “marketing programs” are a relic of the New Deal, a time when the U.S. response to the threat of Soviet five-year plans was to adopt our own, but better. The rest of the economy that was once subject to central planning has since embraced the free market. Farming is among the last holdouts.
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By David B. Rivkin, Jr., Mark DeLaquil, Andrew Grossman, June 15 2015

Note from the Editor:

This article discusses the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan under the Clean Air Act. As always, The Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy initiatives. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. The Federalist Society seeks to foster further discussion and debate about the issues involved. To this end, we offer links to other perspectives on the subject, and we invite responses from our audience. To join the debate, please e-mail us at info@fed-soc.org.

Congress’s statement of policy in the Clean Air Act that “air pollution control at its source is the primary responsibility of States and local governments” is not merely hortatory.1 It reflects both the practical reality of and constitutional limitations on federal regulation of air quality. The practical reality is that the federal government relies on the states both for the detailed policymaking necessary to achieve national goals on a state-by-state basis and for the implementation and enforcement of pollution-control programs with respect to particular sources. But, no matter its reliance, the federal government is forbidden from commandeering the states or their officials to carry out federal law, from coercing them to do so, and from invading the states’ own powers. The Clean Air Act resolves this tension through a system of “cooperative federalism” that gives states the opportunity to regulate in accordance with federal goals and provides for direct federal regulation as a backstop should they fail to do so. This accommodation allows the federal government to enlist the states’ assistance in achieving federal goals without exceeding its authority under the Constitution.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan” (the “Proposed Rule”) abandons that careful accommodation and, in so doing, violates the Tenth Amendment and principles of federalism. The Proposed Rule requires each state to submit a plan to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by a nationwide average of 30 percent by 2030. Although ostensibly directed at emissions from fossil-fuel-fired power plants, the Proposed Rule sets targets for individual states that incorporate “beyond-the-fenceline” cuts to be achieved by increasing reliance on natural gas generation, adopting zero-emissions generation such as wind and solar, and reducing electricity demand. The goal is to phase out coal-fired power plants, which currently account for nearly 40 percent of electricity generation.

In the service of achieving EPA’s policy objectives, the Proposed Rule forces each state to overhaul its energy market. Just to keep the lights on, states will have to dramatically change their energy mix, to account for the loss of coal-fired generating capacity, and to rework their regulation of energy producers, power dispatch, and transmission. This will require changes to states’ legal and regulatory structures, as well as numerous regulatory actions directed at their own citizens—energy producers and consumers alike. In order to accomplish these objectives, even a state that declines to implement the Clean Power Plan will have to employ EPA’s “building blocks” to prevent the Plan from wrecking the state’s energy economy. And states that refuse to accede to EPA’s demand to implement this new program face the specter of financial sanctions. In short, EPA’s Proposed Rule forces the states to act to carry out federal policy. It is a gun to the head of the states: “Your sovereignty or your economy” is EPA’s ultimate demand.
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By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. And ANDREW GROSSMAN, May 21, 2015

We are free to tell you that a clinical trial shows the drug Vascepa to be an effective treatment for persistently high triglyceride levels. But should the drug’s manufacturer, Amarin, tell you or your doctor the same thing, the company would face criminal prosecution and civil liability. Therein lies a First Amendment anomaly, one that may finally be resolved by a lawsuit that Amarin filed earlier this month against the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has long banned promotion of drugs for uses other than those it has approved. Yet so-called off-label uses are legal and account for about 20% of all prescriptions. Some off-label uses of drugs have even become the standard of care for particular conditions.

But the drug’s manufacturer and its agents—and only them—cannot legally talk about this. Patients can—and do—discuss off-label uses of drugs endlessly in online forums. Doctors certainly exchange information about these uses.

But Amarin can’t say anything about the Vascepa trial. The drug is approved only as a treatment for “very high” triglyceride levels, not those that are merely persistently high. As a result, doctors and their patients are being kept in the dark about a treatment that, for some patients, has fewer side effects than other drugs.

The FDA claims its speech ban is a necessary part of its drug-approval process, which requires manufacturers to demonstrate efficacy for each intended use. The agency aggressively investigates and the government regularly prosecutes pharmaceutical companies and their representatives that promote off-label uses of their drugs. Yet once a drug is approved, doctors can prescribe it for any use—and the FDA recognizes, in its regulatory guidance—that such uses are essential to effectively translate medical research into improved health outcomes.

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By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman — Sunday, April 19, 2015

First Amendment lawyers always get asked the same question: Is he really allowed to say that?

The “he,” inevitably, is some television pundit, newspaper columnist or blogger. And the “that” is a stream of invective. A pointed example is economist Paul Krugman’s characterization of Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal: “The most fraudulent budget in American history. And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that.”

So if he meant “just that,” the question goes, isn’t that libel, and why isn’t Mr. Ryan suing him for damages?

And from time to time, we’ve heard the same question raised about one of our own cases, climate scientist Michael Mann’s lawsuit against detractors who harshly criticized his “hockey stick” research. We represent two of the defendants, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its adjunct fellow, Rand Simberg. They called Mr. Mann’s work “intellectually bogus” and biased “data manipulation” done “in the service of politicized science.”

So is it libel? Some may respond with a smirk that truth is an absolute defense, but the answer is actually more basic: There’s nothing to be proven true or false.

Libel law is subject to the First Amendment. Its guarantee of freedom of speech wouldn’t be worth much if the government could authorize private citizens to sue one another over their views. At a minimum, a challenged statement must contain (in the Supreme Court’s formulation) a “provably false factual connotation.”

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