It's been really interesting to see the interplay between State Attorneys General and the federal executive branch over the past decade. I don't know enough legal history to know if this contention is new or has always happened. But the contrast between what happened with regulation of carbon and coal is fairly striking. The federal judicial brach said that it had to be regulated in order to meet the laws that the legislative branch had passed, executive branch followed through with regulations based on science and input from stakes holders. We ended up with regulations on coal plants that are weaker than Chinese restrictions on their own plants. State AGs revolted, to little effect.

In the last year, regulatory decisions at the FCC, EPA, and DOE are being made by fiat, without any of the typical study and justification that typically goes into them. In particular, DOE suggestions to FERC have been denounced by nearly everybody in the energy industry, by nearly every interested outsider, and in a bipartisan fashion from lots of prior FERC commissioners. The general whims of a single person are taking precedence over having market principles, or really any other principle at all. The only parties in favor of the regulations at all are those who directly benefit by guaranteed payments, and they only justify their favor of the regulations through a massive and legally questionable expansion of regulatory power of the regulatory agency, something that these particular partisans are usually against.

With the FCC, we see something similar, an impulse to make regulations without much reasoning behind those regulations except that they favor a small group.

This type of regulation, where particular parties are favored, rather than particular principles, is madness.