By E. Sebastian Arduengo
One of the country’s most significant federal appeals courts has morphed into a hotbed of activist judges striking longstanding federal regulations, says columnist Steven Pearlstein. And at a time when some corporations claim they are hesitant to hire because of regulatory uncertainty.
(The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is so important because it has the responsibility of reviewing mo
st of the rules and interpretative decisions made by federal agencies in the capital. It has also been seen as the U.S. Supreme Court’s farm team, as Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg are all former D.C. circuit judges.)
For example, The Washington Post columnist Pearlstein notes that just before Labor day, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President George W. Bush and possible Supreme Court contender under a Republican administration, issued a ruling in Homer City Generation v. EPA. The case involved the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, where the EPA was trying to regulate the amount of pollution states could dump on other, “downwind” states. As Pearlstein puts it, from Kavanaugh’s decision, “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.”
being implemented for the 2012 elections. The federal court found that state election officials did not have sufficient time to implement the law in compliance with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states from implementing laws that have the intent or the effect “of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” Section 5 requires states and localities with histories of denying minorities the right to vote, South Caroline is one such state, to get “pre-clearance” from the federal court in D.C. or the Department of Justice. 