In his first address to staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma-based lawyer tapped by President Donald Trump to head the EPA, made nice, conciliatory noises: "We can be both pro-energy and pro-environment ... and we don't have to choose," he said. Pruitt's chief aim, he said, was to dispense with the notion that the agency must have an adversarial relationship with state and industry – in short, that "federalism matters."

Pruitt made those remarks last month. He has since said that there's reason to doubt the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide is contributing to climate change. And he is apparently filling key positions at the agency with climate-change skeptics like himself. As Robinson Meyer notes in The Atlantic, Pruitt's hyper-skepticism is so far off the reservation on climate change that, by comparison, companies like Exxon Mobil and Shell look like paragons of rationalism and good corporate citizens.

So we have a glorified kook, not to mention a shill for the fossil fuel industry, running the EPA. How did this happen?

The most obvious answer is that Trump – whose view on climate change, to the extent he can be said to have one, is even kookier than Pruitt's – was elected president. Less obvious, but just as significant, is that opponents of the Obama administration's environmental agenda have been able to couch their opposition, not without justification, in the language of federalism. Obama-era regulations on carbon emissions and mercury were not passed by Congress (it's highly unlikely they could've been passed by Congress); rather, they were established by bureaucratic fiat.

Such policymaking is suboptimal for a couple reasons. The first is that a new president can scrap them as readily as the last one imposed them. The second is that, lacking the stamp of congressional approval, such rule-making provides rhetorical cover to those who oppose the rules on substance; citing "federalism," they don't have to reveal what they truly think. It is nearly impossible, for example, to imagine Pruitt favoring regulations that hurt the fossil fuel industry under any circumstance short of the sound of God's voice telling earthlings that pollution is making it hard to breathe even in heaven.

Ask yourself: If the Obama administration had, say, managed to push a cap-and-trade bill through Congress before the 2010 midterms, what would Pruitt's position have been? What if Democrats, with their short-lived Senate supermajority, had passed their favored policies on carbon emissions and air toxics and President Barack Obama signed them into law? Pruitt may have cried "federal overreach," but the charge wouldn't have quite the same bite, would it?

Whenever there's a question of cloaked ideology in a dispute over process, it's handy to follow the Holmes Rule. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous jurist, once wrote in a letter that "if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Hence, one telltale sign of an honest broker in process disputes, is he or she who declares, against ideological interest, that a given policy is wrong but permissible. For instance, conservative Charles Krauthammer was more than likely being honest when he said that Trump's travel ban, in its first iteration, was "stupid but legal."

True federalists are a rare breed. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims to be one, but his pronouncements on marijuana legalization inclines one to doubt it. But let's not pick on him. The sword of federalism hangs over the heads of both liberals and conservatives. Liberals may like it when states loosen laws on pot, but they weren't particularly fond of states that banned same-sex marriage.

This is why I find the Holmes dictum so useful. Find me someone who declares himself willing to abide by a given policy that will send his fellow citizens to hell, and I will happily call that man a "federalist."