On Wednesday, a barely-noticed House hearing held by Republican lawmakers to address “aggressive litigation” against the DOI delivered a clear takeaway: the GOP is scared of lawsuits. Given their tweeted derision but feckless policy deference to the Misogynist-in-Chief, Congress is hardly acting as a check on Trump, which leaves only the courts to balance federal overreach.
Which, of course, presents issues for the GOP’s anti-environment agenda. For example, an appeals court ruled this week that the EPA doesn’t have to study lost coal jobs from Clean Air Act enforcement, overturning a lower court decision. This was a loss for states that sued the EPA, along with coal company Murray Energy, and those still fighting in the (fake) the War on Coal.
In a second win for the climate this week, a judge ruled that the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the government can proceed. This suit, brought by a group of kids charging the government with a betrayal of the public in failing to reduce emissions, is going to be drawn out for years: the court date is set for February 2018. That means plenty of opportunities for (more) stories about these heroic kids.
These legal headaches and PR nightmares (one tends not to want to be seen fighting children), and the promise of more to come are probably why Republicans quietly slipped an ominous rider into an energy and water spending bill this week. The little-reported provision would allow the federal government to roll back the Waters of the United States rule without going through the process laid out by the Administrative Procedure Act. That way, the landmark regulation can be cast aside without any of that pesky public input (democracy? Nah) or inconvenient scientific justifications (evidence? Please) that would otherwise tie up the repeal in years of litigation.
Fortunately the larger bill needs 60 votes to pass, which requires some Democrats to go along. But even if it doesn’t pass, we can probably expect to see this same gimmick in other bills. Like any good authoritarian, Trump wants no checks on his power, least of all from some well-educated, civic-minded, impartial judge. While the general public may eat up all the misleading nonsense offered up during energy week, as the Washington Post and InsideClimate News both reported this week, judges are not so easy to confuse, distract or mislead.
So, in looking back at energy week, we see little to get excited about. In fact, it turned out to be pretty low energy. Weak!
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