Last week we talked about how the Trump administration is going to keep getting tripped up in courts by facts and reality. Seems like we dropped the ball: last week also saw the release of a new report by the lawyers at EarthJustice detailing their litigation efforts over the past two years. The report focuses on four key cases dealing with pesticides, toxic chemicals, the ozone and offshore drilling. While it’s sad they have to defend these things, it’s encouraging they’ve been so successful.
With 118 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration's pro-polluter agenda, those EarthJustice folks have certainly been busy! More importantly, of the 17 cases that have had major decisions, EarthJustice won 16, giving the administration a stellar six percent win rate.
Last October, the Brookings Institute put together a status report on Trump’s deregulatory agenda and came to a similar conclusion: of 19 court challenges, the Trump administration won only one case, losing or giving up on the other 18. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a five percent win rate.
The NYU School of Law also recently updated its tracker looking at all of Trump’s deregulatory actions, and it tells a similar story. Of the 30 outcomes concerning regulatory rollbacks, only two went in Trump’s favor. This tracker gives him the best score yet--a resounding seven percent success rate.
Now this sounds low, but maybe it’s normal? Maybe presidents routinely charge their staff with undertaking regulatory changes with no hope of passing judicial review?
Nope! Presidential administrations in power from 1982-2004 averaged a nice 69% rate of success when defending attempts to deregulate from legal action.
Now, if you’re skeptical about these tallies, you’re free to put together your own. Many groups are tracking Trump’s deregulatory moves so there are plenty of lists to pull from: Brooking’s big list and Harvard’s rollback tracker to start. Columbia’s Sabin Center has a climate deregulation tracker as well as one on how Trump’s tried to silence science. Reuters keeps its energy and environment deregulatory stories here, Nat Geo has a regularly updated page on environmental rollbacks, NYTimes has info on 78 different rules Trump’s attacking, UCS has its content listed on this page, and NRDC aggregates its coverage on the moves here.
And not to worry, the baddies are watching too (see the Chamber of Commerce’s Energy Tracker).
With a five to seven percent rate of success in courts, no doubt Trump’s polluters really are getting tired of all this winning!
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