CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) – Patrick Morrisey, the West Virginia attorney general taking on President Obama’s clean power plan, is no stranger to the hot seat: He parlayed a love of tennis as a young adult into becoming a line judge at the U.S. Open and other tournaments, regularly standing up to second-guessing by irate players and fans.
Fast forward to 2016. The 48-year-old transplanted New Jersey native is challenging the Obama administration’s calls, joined by several mostly Republican states in suing to try to overturn federal greenhouse gas rules. He says taking the heat on the courts taught him to stay cool in court years later.
“You learn how to handle pressure when you have a crowd of people screaming at you for one of your calls,” Morrisey told The Associated Press. ” … Of course, I’d not like to repeat being booed out of the stadium. But that could be good practice for politics.”
Elected in 2012, West Virginia’s first GOP attorney general in eight decades has made fighting “federal overreach” his mantra. He’s leading a coalition of attorneys general that won a U.S. Supreme Court stay last month against Obama’s clean power plan.
That plan against climate change focuses particularly on cutting pollutants from coal-fired power plants. Welcomed by many, it’s blasted by critics as a possible knockout blow to the coal industry.