Hot Air Court
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Editorial
Posted Monday, April 02, 2007
Judiciary: To green extremists' glee, global warming has joined the long list of issues on which the Supreme Court says courts — not the people's elected leaders — know best.
To which we ask: Why not just let the black-robed tyrants decide everything? The environmentalist left is treating Monday's 5-4 ruling in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency like the arrival of the Green Messiah.
The Sierra Club called it "a watershed moment" and "a total repudiation" of the administration's resistance to drastic measures for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The group said the decision tells industry to hasten the development of alternative energies such as wind and solar.
The justices lined up along strict ideological lines in this first-ever high court case on global warming. Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion found the EPA's refusal to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act fell into the category of being "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law."
The ruling will let Massachusetts, other states, and a group of cities and environmentalist activist groups continue to fight the administration in court to impose more green regulations, especially on motor vehicles.
In revoking EPA policy, the Supreme Court has delivered another classic example of judicial imperialism. Under Article III of the Constitution, the courts should not meddle in executive branch authority.
As Chief Justice John Roberts writes in his dissent, "Relaxing Article III standing requirements" because a state was one of the plaintiffs in this case "has no basis in our jurisprudence, and support for any such 'special solicitude' is conspicuously absent from the Court's opinion."
But according to Stevens, "the unusual importance of the underlying issue persuaded" the slim majority of five liberal justices to act.
In other words, global warming is too important to be left to an elected president or Congress. Once again, as in the Roe v. Wade abortion decision and so many other areas of policy, judges have decided they must save the people from themselves.
As the chief justice complains, the high court has chosen "to transgress 'the proper — and properly limited — role of the courts in a democratic society.' "
Echoing that sentiment, Justice Antonin Scalia says in his dissent that "this Court has no business substituting its own desired outcome for the reasoned judgment of the responsible agency" (i.e. the EPA).
Scalia, in fact, destroys Stevens' reasoning, pointing out that his decision finds the administration violating provisions in the law that do not even exist.
He notes that "the statute says nothing at all about the reasons for which the Administrator may defer making a judgment — the permissible reasons for deciding not to grapple with the (global warming) issue at the present time."
Deferring grappling with an issue, however, is not something the imperial judiciary has ever very much tolerated. Once again, when politicians are too slow in implementing items on the liberals' wish list, the federal courts are only too happy to do their work for them.
ibdeditorials.com |
