Kavanaugh "dismissive of fundamental rules of judicial restraint"; waging 'judicial jihad'-WaPo 2012

[EndGOPPropaganda]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-judicial-jihad-against-the-regulatory-state/2012/10/12/d9eb080c-13ca-11e2-bf18-a8a596df4bee_story.html


The judicial jihad against the regulatory state

By Steven Pearlstein
Columnist
October 13, 2012

After shoveling a billion dollars in campaign cash to elect politicians who pledge never to compromise on anything, business leaders are now shocked — shocked, I tell you — to discover that partisan gridlock once again threatens to send the government off yet another fiscal cliff.

The dirty little secret is that dysfunctional government has become the strategic goal of the radical fringe that has taken over the Republican party. After all, a government that can’t accomplish anything is a government that nobody will like, nobody will pay for and nobody will want to work for. For tea party conservatives, what could be better than that?

But in reading the 60-page opinion by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, you’d have no clue of this historical, political, economic or health context.

You’d have no idea that hundreds of dedicated, highly trained scientists, analysts and statisticians at the EPA might have spent more than a decade devoted to the extremely complex task of figuring out how much of the ozone or sulfur dioxide in the air in Rhode Island originated in Indiana.

Instead, what you get is 60 pages of legal sophistry, procedural hair-splitting and scientific conjecture.

You find a judge without a shred of technical training formulating his own policy solution to an incredibly complex problem and substituting it for the solution proposed by experienced experts.

You find an appeals court judge so dismissive of the most fundamental rules of judicial restraint that he dares to throw out regulations on the basis of concerns never raised during the rule-making process or in the initial court appeal.