California Leads States Seeking to Vacate Permitting Decision

A group of mostly blue states asked a federal appeals court to vacate a recent decision on the authority of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to issue binding permitting rules.

The district court’s decision tossing Biden-era rules on the grounds that CEQ lacks rulemaking power is moot because the council had already canceled the rules on its own, the states led by California told the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Nevertheless, the states want the lower court decision vacated because the question of CEQ’s authority to ...