Washington, D.C., April 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Public interest organizations, 21 states, legal experts, and advocacy groups have filed seven persuasive amici curiae briefs urging the Supreme Court to agree to hear the New Civil Liberties Alliance’s Choice Refrigerants v. EPA lawsuit originally filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. NCLA asks the Justices to set aside a portion of the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 (AIM Act) because it fails to give EPA any direction for how it must allocate 98% of the allowances in the economically significant market for hydrofluorocarbons—compounds used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and other cooling devices. This case offers the Court a chance to fix the Nondelegation Doctrine by reinvigorating or replacing its toothless intelligible-principle test. As it stands, that test does not prevent Congress from delegating its constitutionally-vested legislative power to Executive Branch agencies.
Joined by acclaimed Supreme Court litigators Erin Murphy and Paul Clement as co-counsel at this stage, NCLA and our client Choice Refrigerants thank the courageous amici for supporting this effort.
Excerpts of the briefs filed by amici curiae in support of granting the petition follow:
“Congress harms our whole constitutional order when it divests itself of legislative power like this. Amici States in turn suffer real harms; they lose their ability to regulate their own citizens in areas of traditional concern and shed their signature character as ‘laboratories of democracy.’”
— State of West Virginia and 20 Other States
“If the AIM Act passes muster with the intelligible-principle test, then it seems there is no test at all.”
— Manhattan Institute
“Obviously, one plausible construction of the AIM Act’s silence is that it is silent as to how the EPA was to distribute allowances. The D.C. Circuit concluded that a second plausible construction is that the AIM Act directs that allowances be distributed in the same way as the Clean Air Act. But the text itself contains no evidence of this idea and contains much evidence of its opposite.”
— Southeastern Legal Foundation
“If the decision below stands, the executive will be able to legislate via administrative fiat by rewriting the content of vague statutes. Instead of going through the constitutional process of legislative bicameralism and presidential presentment, the meaning of these laws will whipsaw based on who controls the agency. Regulated parties like Choice will be left to deal with the consequences of an Etch A Sketch legal landscape.”
— Cato Institute
“When a lower court encounters a statute that transfers massive regulatory power without any guiding standard, the court’s job is to recognize the constitutional defect—not to paper over it. By permitting Congress to punt hard choices to unaccountable agencies and then constructing intelligible principles out of legislative history to validate that punt, the lower court subverted the very accountability that Article I demands.”
— Mountain States Legal Foundation
“The AIM Act’s cap-and-trade scheme runs roughshod over the Constitution’s structural guardrails, granting EPA untrammeled power to reshape a multi-billion-dollar industry to achieve whatever policy aims it may conjure.”
— Americans for Prosperity Foundation
“This case provides the Court with a clear opportunity to begin to revitalize the nondelegation doctrine, and with it, the Constitution’s limits on government powers.”
— Advancing American Freedom, American Association of Senior Citizens, Center for Independent Thought, and many others
NCLA released the following statement:
“There is near universal agreement among objective scholars that the federal courts’ current doctrine fails to keep legislative power limited to the legislative branch. We thank each of the amici for helping to highlight that the Choice case presents the ideal vehicle for the Supreme Court to make an overdue course correction.”
— Zhonette Brown, General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
For more information visit the case page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
