Category Archives: law

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

Leftist School Districts Child Abuse

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When the Supreme Court ruled in Mahoud et al v Taylor et al, that schools may not prevent parents, via any means at all, from opting their children out of school events, including lessons, involving LGBTQ-related themes, here are Leftist-run schools and their Progressive-Democrat politicians deliberately ignoring that ruling and denying parents precisely that option.

  • Suburban Boston’s Lexington Public Schools refused to show parents curricula in advance while demanding they identify specific lessons for opting out, and claimed books that simply promote “tolerance” are exempt, according to a “Catch-22” lawsuit.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta [D] convinced a federal appeals court [the activist judge-dominated 9th Circuit] that forcing school districts to actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity was not covered by Mahmoud at all because it doesn’t involve “curricular decisions.”
  • Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District…us[ed] an old standby—lunch with a teacher—to discuss LGBTQ themes without parental approval.

It’s true that the Supreme Court ruling is a temporary injunction pending final adjudication of the underlying case as that case makes its way through the courts; however, it remains in effect, and from that it is the law of the land.

This is the lawlessness of the Left overlying their insistent child abuse with “sex” lessons far beyond their years and deliberately outside the children’s parents’ rights and obligations.

Missed in the Discussion?

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The People’s Republic of China has a “national team” of investors who work at the government’s behest to maintain a measure of stability in the PRC’s stock market.

The group is known by market players as the “national team,” and it functions as a market stabilization fund. It has been a fixture in the Chinese stock market for more than a decade, usually buying exchange-traded funds, and was widely noted when it intervened to prop up prices during a 2015 crash. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025, triggering a global stock selloff, the national team stepped in to relieve the pain as a buyer of index funds.

On the other hand,

The CSI 300 benchmark, which tracks shares listed in both Shanghai and Shenzhen, has risen more than 20% over the past year, despite the April dip. Last month, trading volume across mainland Chinese stock exchanges reached a record high.
…
“Substantial yet well-paced selling by the national team is curbing—but not killing—the positive market momentum,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note earlier this month.

Maybe this is the government doing a slow pump-and-dump, which is one way to make money (not legally in most western nations), maybe not. In any event, it’s also textbook investing: buy low and sell high. Either way, this is making a lot of money for the PRC government, which in turn provides serious money for subsidizing its cost of goods production and for offsetting the effects of foreign (mostly US) tariffs on PRC exports. More the former, most likely, since the PRC has been able to increase its exports to Europe and South America, to their economic dependency peril.

It’s a Legal Question

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It’s most assuredly not a medical question, nor is it a climate question. The EPA is going to announce (if it hasn’t already at the time this post is published) a roll-back of its Gina McCarthy-Barack Obama era “finding” that atmospheric carbon dioxide was a pollutant, a finding that enabled the exploding and increasingly intrusive and costly regulatory environment over a host of CO2 emission items.

The final rule, set to be made public later this week, removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse-gas emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
It wouldn’t apply to rules governing emissions from power plants and other stationary sources such as oil-and-gas facilities, the officials said. But repealing the finding could open up the door to rolling back regulations that affect those facilities.

Many of those latter regulations do need to be removed, but not all. Sulphur and mercury in smokestack emissions, for instance, still are things, but these are easily controlled—and have been for years—even with now-aging technologies and will remain regulated. CFC impacts on atmospheric ozone is less settled, but will remain regulated until a more definitive answer—by actual scientists, not government bureaucrats with science degrees or degreed folks employed by the climate funding industry—is reached.

The kicker is in this:

Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year.

Even were that true, it is, or it would be in a properly objective court, irrelevant to the question of whether the McCarthy/Biden EPA finding can be repealed. Notice that: can be, not should be. This is a purely legal question: can one administration withdraw a regulatory finding and associated regulations that a prior administration enacted? Of course it can, and a current administration can rescind such things unilaterally. Only Congressionally-enacted statutes require subsequent Congressionally-enacted statutes to be rescinded. All it takes is judges and Justices who will honor their oaths of office and hew themselves to what our Constitution and the statutes before them say rather than what they might wish they said.

Of course, many of today’s District and appellate judges are badly trained by such claptrap as the chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, used by the Federal Judicial Center to “train” judges on climate systems, attribution science, and methodologies used to link greenhouse gas emissions to specific impacts by representing these things as settled science. The chapter has since been removed from the manual, but not necessarily the separate “training” associated with it, and certainly not the “training” already done.

As the WSJ correctly noted, here come now the climate-funding industry and its fee-seeking lawyers.

Environmental groups have said they would challenge a rollback in the courts, and it could be years before litigation is resolved.

Because of course they will. There’re tons of money to be made from their manufactured climate hysteria, and that income pig trough needs to be protected. There also are fees to be collected from those lawsuits.

Never mind that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which humans and plants aren’t the only species that don’t eat.

Bad Logic

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Arizona passed a law five years ago that essentially banned forceable DEI training. An ASU professor brought suit to clarify that the law also

gives public employees an “implied private right of action” to stop such coercion, which in his case was ASU training on how to “critique whiteness.”

A State district court agreed with the professor and ruled accordingly. An Arizona appellate court

“astonishingly” construed lawmakers’ silence on enforcement as confirmation that individuals cannot sue….

The euphemism quotes are from the professor’s lawyers in their reaction to the ruling and as they prepare to appeal to the State’s supreme court.

The lawyers—and any high school student who didn’t sleep through his logic class—are right to be astonished. The appellate court’s “argument” (my euphemism quotes this time) that saying nothing means cannot sue is textbook logic failure. The lawmakers’ silence means nothing other than that they said nothing. The appellate court’s claim otherwise is the court’s putting words into the lawmakers’ mouths the judges have no way of knowing belong there—unless the judges are claiming heretofore unheard of powers of mind reading.