The agency has pumped the brakes on Civil Rights Act investigations out of apparent fear that a Louisiana challenge could make it to the Supreme Court.
    • pacoboyd
      10•10 months ago

      I wasn’t going to respond, but then I read the article and not just the headline and your goading appears to actually be the crux of the issue. The whole thing is a about how the EPA is worried the cases will make it to the Trump appointed conservative Supreme Court who will likely limit and undercut them further.

      • Aniki 🌱🌿English
        5•10 months ago

        So better to do nothing than do something? What chicken shit is that?

        • Sonori
          5•10 months ago

          The kind that says it’s better to continue doing all the somethings you can and are currently doing than trying to do something that you can’t and which inevitably results in then being able to do nothing because all of your agency’s jurisdiction to have any teeth just got ruled unconstitutional.

          Our government is based on checks and balances between a fundamental legislature, judicial, and executive branch working together to achieve results. When conservatives hold the courts, the House, and a tie in the Senate, it’s really silly to expect that just because the figurehead who’s entire job is to do as the conservative legislature demands as the conservative court dictates is somehow going to make vast sweeping changes. Indeed in theory the main thing he should be able to do is veto the dumb stuff congress sends his way, but with the tie and the conservatives childish inability to even draft legislation there’s not much of that.

          You want vast sweeping change? Arrange a unfortunate accident for a justice in minecraft or vote in enough Dems and maybe even more than a handful of actual leftists in so that you don’t need two conservatives who run as Democrat’s votes to do even the most basic housekeeping in the Senate and retake the large majority in the House, instead of arguing for the theory of thought that the president should do everything, have all the power, and just trust that never in the future of America will any Republican ever win the electoral college and dissolve everything you’ve built day one by writing the manifesto handed to them by the Heritage Foundation.

          • @HelixTitan@beehaw.org
            3•10 months ago

            Or remind the Judiciary that their rulings are only enforced if the executive agrees to enforce the ruling. Remind them they technically don’t have the constitutional right to declare laws unconstitutional. Then you remind the nation that the crux of their argument was that Congress needs to make the final call, when Congress itself delegated it’s duties when the EPA was created. They have nothing but hot gas, time we stopped fearing the burnout.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    1•10 months ago

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    Landry’s suit challenges a key piece of the agency’s regulatory authority: the disparate impact standard, which says that policies that cause disproportionate harm to people of color are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

    This enables the EPA to argue that it’s discriminatory for state agencies to keep greenlighting contaminating facilities in communities of color already overburdened by pollution — such as in Cancer Alley — even if official policies do not announce discrimination as their intent.

    Experts say that the EPA appears to be shying away from certain Civil Rights Act investigations in states that are hostile to environmental justice, due to fears that Landry’s suit or similar efforts could make their way to the conservative Supreme Court.

    The agency has never actually withheld funding due to discrimination, but by 2021, a change seemed to be in the air: Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the EPA began to process and pursue over a dozen Title VI environmental justice cases in at least nine states, including Louisiana.

    Flint’s case was strikingly similar: Plaintiffs alleged the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, had violated Title VI by issuing air pollution permits to an asphalt plant in a low-income Black community.

    Leonard, of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, noted that while the EPA’s fears of a Supreme Court decision undermining their authority are well-founded, advocates and attorneys have always known that the agency would face pushback, should it decide to take more forceful action on civil rights enforcement.

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