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According to reporting at Common Dreams:
Environmental advocates cheered a federal judge's ruling Thursday that voided oil and gas leases on roughly one million acres of public lands and rejected a Trump administration policy that accelerated extraction of the fossil fuels.
"The judge confirmed that it's illegal to silence the public to expand fossil-fuel extraction," said Taylor McKinnon, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.
The lawsuit centered on a 2018 memoradum, "No. 2018-034," issued by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency of the Interior Department. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is a former oil and gas lobbyist.
Also key was that the areas in question are habitat for the greater sage grouse, whose numbers are in decline.
[...]Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush said BLM was "arbitrary and capricious" in issuing the new policy, and said the agency clearly sought to mute public input.
The "BLM jettisoned prior processes, practices, and norms in favor of changes that emphasized economic maximization—to the detriment, if not outright exclusion, of pre-decisional opportunities for the public to contribute to the decision-making process affecting the management of public lands," he wrote.
"The agency's administrative record," Bush continued, "reveals no analysis that would explain or justify the transition" from the Obama-era policy to the new one "and the resulting curtailment of the public's involvement in oil and gas leasing decisions on public land."
The administration's shift appears to be "a mechanism for unharnessing prior constraints upon oil and gas leasing by specifically reducing or eliminating public involvement in the oil and gas leasing process because such public involvement hindered the oil and gas production industry," he added.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:46PM (9 children)
How many such products of politicking from the bench, have already been thrown out by the upper courts, hmm?
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:55PM (4 children)
Enforcing laws that Trump doesn't happen to like is not activism.
Maybe if he would bother to learn how government works he could do something to change those laws.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:26PM (3 children)
Fair enough.
Though selectively not enforcing laws one don't like is activism. Such as immigration law in"sanctuary cities".
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:29PM (2 children)
Cities don't enforce federal laws.
I wish you guys would learn how our government works before opining about it.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:40AM (1 child)
Cities in recent years have actively prevented the enforcement of federal laws. That IS illegal, and people not in politically protected groups often end up in Club Fed for interfering with U. S. government law enforcement.
Bank robbers, rapists, and murderers have been assisted in escaping ICE officials by a Boston-area judge because the law-breakers were illegal aliens. This is not acceptable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @12:05AM
I accept it. What's your problem? Are you a racist?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 04 2020, @07:45PM (3 children)
I've noticed an interesting pattern here: Judges that say "Yes, the president has to follow the law as written, and if you don't like it you have to get Congress to change the law" are being declared "activists" and presumably aren't supposed to be listened to. Meanwhile, judges that say "The president and his appointees can ignore the law whenever they don't like it" aren't getting the same treatment, despite the fact that that is an extremely radical position that has no precedent at all.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @08:31PM (2 children)
It occurred to me today that our two party system, as practiced recently with near total solidarity, has made impeachment and many other of the checks and balances basically irrelevant when one party has achieved control of two branches of government. Things like conflict of interest in politicians' business holdings have become a sad joke, not only at the Federal level but also state Governors.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:13PM (1 child)
The problem is that the US Constitution, and many state constitutions, were written without considering political parties, among other things. The plan was for each representative or senator to be representing their constituents, not a faction or party. And as you might have guessed, that's almost never worked out that way.
For instance, in the Federalist Papers #10, James Madison argued that the large size of the US would prevent a minority faction from ever coordinating its efforts effectively to take over the country from the will of the majority. But that doesn't work when that minority faction is organizing itself within the halls of government in Washington DC, or coordinating with itself via modern telecommunications.
Basically, they screwed up in thinking that everyone who went into politics in the US would actually believe in democracy, i.e. the idea that the point of government is to carry out the will of the people provided a basic set of personal liberties are preserved.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:44AM
Democracy is one of the things that the Founders deliberately avoided. They would have been horrified by the direct election of Senators, which is one of the sources of today's problems.