Missouri v. Biden

Missouri and 10 other states filed a petition for writ of certiorari seeking review of the dismissal, on standing grounds, of their challenge to the Biden administration’s interim social costs of greenhouse gases and President Biden’s executive order requiring the publication of the interim social costs of greenhouse gases and other related actions. The petition presented the question of whether the states’ alleged harms to their proprietary and sovereign interests (as well as a completed procedural injury) were sufficient for Article III standing. The petition argued that the states had alleged “a host of injuries that relate to the fact that the Interim Values will inevitably expand the federal regulatory burdens on the States and their citizens in virtually every major sector of American economic life” and result in harms to the states’ “proprietary interests in energy consumption by homes, industries, and farms, their energy production to neighboring states, and the tax revenue that arises from these economic activities.” The states contended that these harms were not speculative. The states also alleged that the challenged actions harmed their sovereign interests by directing how states must conduct their duties in cooperative-federalism programs. They argued that the Eighth Circuit “simply refused to provide the special solicitude owed States.” The alleged procedural injury was an “deprivation of the right to participate in notice-and-comment rulemaking.”