Why Scott Pruitt to the EPA?

Why did Donald Trump choose Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of Oklahoma and an expert in constitutional law, to be the next head of the EPA? Perhaps the best answer to this question was given by Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

According to his biography on the Massey & Gail website:

The New York Times describes Professor Tribe as "arguably the most famous constitutional scholar and Supreme Court practitioner in the country." The Northwestern Law Review has opined that no one else "in American history has . . . simultaneously achieved Tribe's preeminence . . . as a practitioner and . . . scholar of constitutional law."

Professor Tribe has successfully advised leading business corporations, members of Congress, states, and many other clients on constitutional questions, statutory and administrative issues, and complex legal matters of all types. Widely admired and unusually successful as an appellate advocate, he has argued 37 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court - orally argued 35 cases and presented 2 more in which the Court ruled in his clients' favors without argument - and has lost only 13. ... Professor Tribe has written 115 books and articles, including his treatise, "American Constitutional Law," which has been cited more often than any other legal text since 1950. He helped draft the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands. Professor Tribe is one of only 60 professors in the history of Harvard to be designated "University Professor," the university's highest academic title.

According to Wikipedia:

Among [Professor Tribe's] law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been President Barack Obama (a research assistant for two years), Chief Justice John Roberts (as a law student in his classes), US Senator Ted Cruz, Chief Judge and Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan (as a research assistant).

Liberal and Democratic lawyers and legal experts have often mentioned Professor Tribe as a potential Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president (see here).

Of the constitutionality of the Clean Power Plan promulgated by President Obama's EPA Professor Tribe has written:

I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means. ... After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority. ... [T]he EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not. (emphasis added)

In other words, one of our nation's most respected constitutional law scholars and a potential Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court has concluded categorically that President Obama's Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional. Scott Pruitt was one of the state attorneys general who brought legal action to halt this illegal usurpation of power by the EPA. It would be difficult to imagine a candidate better qualified to rein in the unconstitutional expansion of the powers of the EPA under President Obama than Scott Pruitt.