OKLAHOMA SUES TO BLOCK OBAMA’S CLEAN POWER PLAN: Oklahoma filed a lawsuit yesterday afternoon in the Northern District of Oklahoma, challenging the EPA’s overreaching “Clean Power Plan,” a unilateral, executive branch global warming climate change transformation, ostensibly grounded in the Clean Air Act, that will require an unachievable 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired plants and threaten the reliability and affordability of electricity:

But in the complaint filed Wednesday, [Oklahoma Attorney General Scott] Pruitt argues that the court has authority because Oklahoma is already experiencing the effects of the EPA’s rule, and there is nothing that could happen, short of judicial intervention, that could stop it.

“Unless this Court intervenes, Oklahoma will have no meaningful or adequate remedy to enforce the limitations that the Clean Air Act and the Constitution place on the authority of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and its Administrator and to avoid injury to its sovereign, quasi-sovereign, fiscal, and economic interests,” Pruitt wrote in his complaint.

The state also asks the court for a preliminary injunction to immediately stop the EPA from moving forward on the rule while the court proceedings go on.

Pruitt, a Republican, has been one of the most vocal opponents of President Obama’s EPA in general and the climate rule specifically.

He told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in May that “the EPA, under this administration, treats states like a vessel of federal will. The EPA believes the states exist to implement the policies the administration sees fit, regardless of whether laws like the Clean Air Act permit such action.”

The EPA has repeatedly defended the regulation has a legal and necessary exercise of its authority under the Clean Air Act.

The lawsuit presents some intriguing constitutional claims, asserting that the EPA’s proposal coerces and commandeers the States, and thus violates the principle of federalism. Liberal constitutional Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has made similar constitutional assertions, a position for which Tribe has been criticized by fellow leftists for “selling out” because he has agreed to represent an energy company, Peabody Energy, in other legal challenges against the EPA’s plan. That lawsuit was dismissed recently by the D.C. Circuit because it did not have jurisdiction to issue a writ of prohibition because the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is not yet a “final” rule. The Oklahoma lawsuit, by contrast, does not request a writ of prohibition, instead relying on a series of cases allowing challenges to ultra vires, pre-final agency action. In the name of full disclosure, I am one of the lawyers working on behalf of Oklahoma.