California on Monday sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (read the complaint here), alleging the federal government improperly interfered with the Golden State’s ability to enforce its own heightened emission standards by distorting the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to reclassify previously granted Clean Air Act (CAA) preemption waivers as rules subject to congressional control. The lawsuit asks the court to vacate the EPA’s reclassification and deem such an action a violation of the APA and to ultimately enjoin the EPA from reclassifying previously granted waivers.

The waivers allowed California to adopt stricter emission regulations than EPA’s regulations under the CAA, resulting in California’s own automotive greenhouse gas emission standards in 2008, Advance Clean Cars rules in 2012, and subsequent amendments to small offroad engine rules. The waivers were not previously considered “rules” subject to congressional approval. Rather, California argues now, the waivers amount to “finalized adjudicatory orders,” especially since they were already granted long ago and applied since then and are, therefore, not subject to congressional review under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

Last week, however, the EPA submitted the four preemption waivers to Congress, requesting that Congress reclassify the waivers as rules subject to congressional disapproval, and, thereby subject to congressional control via the CRA. This in turn would enable the federal government to use the APA as a tool to enable the EPA to “administratively” revoke the waivers granted roughly a decade and a half ago. California argues, however, that it has been a bipartisan view for five decades that waivers are not rules and that the EPA’s attempt to reclassify California’s waivers as rules is an illegal effort to eliminate key methods of fighting pollution.

This is not the first attempt by the current Congress to revoke already-approved waivers for California’s more stringent vehicle emissions standards. Notably, when Congress attempted this last year, the Senate Parliamentarian, which determines which agency acts are subject to congressional review and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that waivers were not, in fact, rules subject to congressional review under the CRA. California, along with 10 other states, also filed a lawsuit in that matter. In that ongoing action the EPA had also submitted preemption waivers for congressional disapproval, claiming that prior administrations had failed to submit the waivers for congressional review, which, despite the objections of the Parliamentarian and the GAO, claims the current EPA, in opposition to its own previous conclusions, is an improper application of the law.

In four months, it is likely that Congress will no longer have a majority as amenable to signing off on the current EPA’s novel reclassification of preemption waivers. Therefore, whether California’s road rules can survive as they’ve previously been applied across at least four different administrations may be dependent upon who exactly is in the congressional driver’s seats.