Supreme Court Climate Case Excites GOP as a Check on Regulators

A U.S. Supreme Court argument Monday has the potential to give conservatives a new lever to slash the power of federal regulatory agencies with ramifications that reach far beyond the environmental issues at hand.

Coal-mining companies and Republican-led states are seeking sharp limits on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. That would jeopardize President Joe Biden’s pledge to halve those emissions by the end of the decade.

More broadly, the case could produce a defining moment for the movement to rein in the so-called administrative state, a project some legal conservatives say ...