After the Biden administration took steps to raise the cost estimate of carbon emissions, Republican attorneys general filed suit and took their case to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
There, they found Judge James Cain, tapped for the federal bench by Donald Trump, who predictably ruled in 2022 against the Democratic White House and its climate agenda.
A year later, the same Louisiana judge sided with oil companies in a closely watched case related offshore drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, Cain is again making headlines — and for similar reasons. The Washington Post reported that the conservative jurist blocked President Joe Biden’s pause on approving new facilities that export liquefied natural gas, “dealing another legal blow to the president’s ambitious climate agenda.”
In a decision issued late Monday, U.S. District Judge James D. Cain Jr. ruled in favor of Louisiana and 15 other Republican-led states that had challenged the move. The judge, who was appointed by Donald Trump, wrote that the pause “is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy [sic].”
I’ll leave it to others to determine whether the conservative judge meant “epiphany” or “epitome.” Similarly, it’s not altogether clear in context whether Cain intended to use the word “ideocracy” — given its meaning, this seemed like a curious choice of words — or if he was trying to reference “Idiocracy.”
Either way, there’s a larger pattern that’s worth appreciating: Biden has had some important and impressive successes on combatting the climate crisis, but Republican-appointed judges haven’t exactly made his job easier.
On the contrary, Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices in 2022 curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, and as the Post’s report added, those same far-right jurists issued a pair of decisions last week “that sharply curtailed the power of federal agencies to address climate change, air pollution and other pressing environmental problems.”
Earlier this year, meanwhile, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of Texas, another Trump appointee, struck down a Biden administration climate policy that required states “to measure and set declining targets for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles using the national highway system.” The New York Times reported two years ago on “a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.” The article added, “Coming up through the federal courts are more climate cases, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases.” Those plans appear to be advancing apace, which is great news for the oil and coal industries, and bad news for life on Earth.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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