Obama Victory: High Court Deals Harsh Blow To Right Wing Anti-Clean Air Gang
Read Time:1 Minute, 22 Second
It seems that Jesus and his gang, or at least their textbook, is helping out the good guys as yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is seen as a big victory for the White House and the EPA on air pollution.
In Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion, she cited the Gospel according to John, notes the Washington Post: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” In this case, she was talking about the wind that bloweth air pollution from coal-fired plants across state lines, and her ruling upheld the EPA’s authority to regulate it.
The New York Times calls it “a major environmental victory for the Obama administration,” and SCOTUSblog agrees that it’s a “clear victory for the EPA.” The result is that about 1,000 power plants will have to put into place new pollution controls to limit nitrogen and sulfur emissions, reports theGuardian.
The problem of air pollution blowing from coal-burning states into states downwind—think Ohio and Kentucky vs. Connecticut and New York—is a complex one, Ginsburg wrote, and the EPA must have the leeway to deal with the “vagaries of the wind.” She thinks the EPA got it right with its current formula, though Antonin Scalia disagreed in his dissent. The case, he wrote, underscores “the major problem that many citizens have with the federal government these days: that they are governed not so much by their elected representatives as by an unelected bureaucracy operating under vague statutory standards.”
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Tree huggers for the win. It’s about damn time something was done about foul air and it’s too bad we cannot get rid of some of it that flows around congress at the same time.
…and, for the record, it DOES matter how you get there in the world of legal precedent, but a victory is a victory. Let’s hope the litigants did their best to establish impenetrable precedent.
Let’s hope!
Applause for a good SCOTUS decision. Rare as hen’s teeth these days.
To carry on the Biblical theme, litigation works in mysterious ways. One would think that “downwind” citizens in the polluting states would have the same rights to clean air as the citizens of downwind neighboring states, whither the effluent goeth. But I guess it doesn’t matter HOW you get to justice, so long as you get there.
As for Ginsburg’s Bible citation, I see that as the invocation of ancient wisdom…a bit of a shame on us for not respecting the lessons of the past. They knew this stuff in the earliest part of the era we know as CE.
While I approve of the ruling, Justice Ginsberg quoting the babble sounds like a violation of church and state to me.
Let’s remember the right wing is not above using that the challenge the decision. But then, is there anything that they are not above using?
No, they are operating as part of the society, as opposed to just under the authority of their own tiny group. It’s a difficult balance to maintain – that between an individual state and the nation as a whole, but I’m truly glad that some balance has been reached!