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More broadly, the court was asked to address whether Congress must “speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions.” That theory is often referred to as the “major questions doctrine,” and it played a key role in Thursday’s decision.
在更广泛的层面上，最高法院被要求回答国会“在授权行政机构处理重大政治和经济问题时”，是否必须“使用特别清晰的措辞”。这一说法通常被称为“重大问题原则”，在周四的裁决中发挥了关键作用。
Chief Justice Roberts, employing the phrase for the first time in a majority opinion, said it applied in cases of unusual significance and was meant to address “a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”
首席大法官罗伯茨在主要意见书中首次采用了这一名称，他说，重大问题原则适用于具有不同寻常意义的案件，旨在解决“一个特殊且反复出现的问题: 某些机构维护自己极为重大的权力，而这种权力超出了国会为人所理解的合理授予范围。”
The provision of the Clean Air Act the Biden administration pointed to was too oblique, and so ran afoul of the major questions doctrine, the chief justice wrote.
首席大法官写道，拜登政府指出的《清洁空气法案》条款过于拐弯抹角，因此与重大问题原则相抵触。
Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion advanced a central goal of the conservative legal movement, that of curtailing the power of the administrative state. But it did so in a characteristically measured way.
首席大法官罗伯茨的意见将保守派法律运动的一个核心目标向前推动了一步，即限制这个国家的行政权力。但是保守派的做法一如既往地审慎。
In a full-throated 19-page concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., elaborated on what the chief justice had written.
大法官尼尔·戈萨奇和大法官小塞缪尔·阿利托在一份长达19页的协同意见书中，详细阐述了这位首席大法官所写的内容。
“When Congress seems slow to solve problems, it may be only natural that those in the executive branch might seek to take matters into their own hands,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “But the Constitution does not authorize agencies to use pen-and-phone regulations as substitutes for laws passed by the people’s representatives.”
“当国会在解决问题上行动迟缓时，正常的做法可能就是行政部门设法自己动手解决问题，”大法官戈萨奇写道。“但宪法没有授权行政机构使用笔头和口头规定来代替人民代表通过的法律。”
In dissent, Justice Kagan wrote that the statute at issue in the case had given the agency ample authority.
大法官卡根提出异议并写道，作为本案焦点的法规已经赋予了环保局充分的权力。
“The Clean Air Act was major legislation, designed to deal with a major public policy issue,” she wrote, adding: “Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues — even significant ones — as and when they arise.”
“《清洁空气法案》是一部重大法规，旨在解决一个重大的公共政策问题，”她写道，并补充，“国会在起草法规时很清楚自己不知道和无法知道哪些事情；因此，国会赋予专门机构在问题出现时去解决这些问题的权力，甚至包括意义重大的问题。”
She added that the agency was best suited to take on climate change. “This is not the attorney general regulating medical care, or even the C.D.C. regulating landlord-tenant relations,” she wrote. “It is E.P.A. (that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, in case the majority forgot) acting to address the greatest environmental challenge of our time.”
她补充说，环保局是应对气候变化最合适的机构。“这不是总检察长在监管医疗问题，甚至也不是疾控中心在监管房东和租客之间的关系。” 她写道，“而是EPA（也就是环境保护局，以防多数派法官们忘记了这是什么机构）要采取行动，应对我们这个时代最大的环境挑战。”
