Source: https://law.lclark.edu/live/news/39054-professor-powers-thoughts-on-kennedys-retirement
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 15:05:36+00:00

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All 25 of Trump’s potential nominees are “more conservative” than Kennedy.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, announced Wednesday afternoon, sent shock waves across the capital, with experts and pundits rushing to analyze the potential repercussions. For the future of environmental protection and climate action, the news means “nothing good,” according to legal experts.
During Kennedy’s time on the bench over the past three decades, he has served as the deciding vote in many cases, including some landmark environmental rulings. Most notably, Kennedy was the critical fifth vote in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007. This case established two major precedents: that states can sue the federal government for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and that greenhouse gas emissions are pollutants under the Clean Air Act and the EPA must decide whether and how to regulate them.
Kennedy’s retirement is “terrible news for environmental law and the protection of public health and the environment,” Patrick Parenteau, law professor and senior counsel in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School, told ThinkProgress.
As most experts agree, Kennedy will almost certainly be replaced with a more conservative judge, tipping the balance further to the right and leaving key environmental protection rulings vulnerable.
According to statistics compiled by Scotusblog.com, Kennedy has voted in the majority 91 percent of the time this term; last term he was 97 percent with the majority. In almost every environmental case, Kennedy has voted with the majority, which means he has a mixed record on environmental issues. For example, in a 2001 case, he sided with the conservative majority to rule that the Clean Water Act doesn’t authorize the federal government to regulate dredging and filing of isolated wetlands.
However, experts describe Kennedy as willing to consider nuance and complexity when it comes to environmental issues.
Kennedy’s nuanced approach was apparent in a 2006 case, Rapanos v. United States, regarding efforts to develop a property that was designated as a wetland. In his concurring opinion, Kennedy said waters must have a “significant nexus” to navigable rivers and seas — this includes biological or chemical connections which aren’t necessarily physically visible the way streams and rivers are.
Where Kennedy perhaps had a more cross-cutting impact is on the issue of what’s known as “standing,” experts explain. This is the ability of a party bringing or defending a case — a person or organization for instance — to demonstrate that they have sufficient connection to the issue. Basically, do they have a real stake in the fight?
In the Mass. v. EPA case, Kennedy recognized standing. “I wouldn’t say he had a liberal understanding of standing, he had a nuanced understanding,” said Burger, whereas other judges have a “much more close minded view,” he said.
This matters for environmental cases because recognizing standing — or rather, having a more limited view of who can stand in a case — will impact the ability of citizens and nonprofit organizations to challenge the courts on environmental issues.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, “was a leading proponent of raising the bar for environmental litigants to prove standing,” Melissa Powers, director of the Green Energy Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, told ThinkProgress.
Scalia’s ruling in a 1992 case (Defenders of Wildlife v. Lujan), for example, has been used to rule against environmental plaintiffs, Powers explained. So if the next judge is more likely to rule like Scalia did, standing will become more difficult to prove.
In the Mass v. EPA case, the plaintiffs did a “really good job” of submitting scientific declarations to support their right to stand, Powers explained. Despite the final verdict, however, Chief Justice Roberts rejected the scientists’ conclusions regarding the impacts of climate change in his dissent — dismissing things like the damaging impact of sea level rise on coastal property. He also got the science wrong, according to Powers.
President Trump has said that he will pick one of the 25 contenders on his listcompiled last year. All of these nominees are “more conservative than Kennedy. All have been vetted by the Federalist Society,” Parenteau said of the right wing think tank’s approval of Trump’s list.
Meanwhile, Amul Thapar of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, “railed against EPA’s mercury regulations while introducing a panel I was on at the National Federalist Society Convention last November,” Percival told ThinkProgress.
There’s also Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) who made headlines for blocking federal aid to Flint, Michigan in the wake of a devastating lead contamination crisis. Lee has also praised the president for reducing the size of two national monuments in his state.
And then there’s Patrick Wyrick, who served as Oklahoma’s solicitor general until last year and is “quite close” to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, said Percival.
It’s unclear what risk there is to the landmark Mass. v. EPA ruling, which opened the door for states to sue the federal government over climate change. A more conservative court could perhaps curtail its reach — the groundwork for which was already laid by Scalia.
David Doniger, senior strategic director for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean energy program, also noted that there have been two key decisions since 2007 that have followed the Mass. v. EPA ruling.
There is one twist, however, that could bring some good news, according to Powers. It’s related to federalism. Some states have recently enacted climate policies that other fossil fuel-producing states view as a threat to their local economy; take, for instance, the current battle between Wyoming and Washington State. Under the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, states are prohibited from passing laws that are designed to discriminate against out-of-state commerce, Powers explained.
With more conservative judges who value federalism, there could be a scenario in which they do not accept the dormant Commerce Clause because they are more in favor of allowing states to make their own decisions. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, has called the clause into question. All of this means that should judges come down against it, it could create an opportunity for states to push more progressive local climate policies. View the article on ThinkProgress here.
Get ready for a court that’s even more partisan.
For liberals, the natural impulse when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring from the Supreme Court last week was to worry.
Donald Trump getting another seat on the court will mean a solid majority of conservative justices—Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, nonetheless sometimes sided with the more liberal wing of the court—which could lead to Roe v. Wade getting struck down and some red states resurrecting abortion bans.
Beyond Roe, however, there are other concerns. The court is unpredictable and it’s hard to say with anything approaching certainty what kind of cases future justices will hear and decide. But it’s possible to make broad predictions, which is what I asked four court-watchers to do.
Anil Kalhan, a law school professor at Drexel University, sees the court becoming more partisan. That doesn’t mean a more conservative court—though, he added, that’s sure to be the case with another Trump nominee—but one where decisions continue to be “aggressive.” When the court makes 5–4 decisions that rely on a single swing vote, as was the case with Kennedy, the majority is less likely to look to find middle ground with the other side because it doesn’t need their votes. That trend, Kalhan said, will continue.
Of course, that’s just part of the court becoming more political. Kalhan specifically pointed to the court’s right-wing leanings and justices’ ties to the political conservative movement as indicative of a negative trend in the behavior of some justices. “The GOP and the conservative movement have treated the court much more as a political institution than the Democrats,” Kalhan explained.
To Kalhan, the issue is about more than the court ruling in favor of the Republican Party and the conservative movement on cases involving voting rights. Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, is a lobbyist and Tea Party activist; justices openly speak at gatherings of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, which is playing an outsized role in selecting Kennedy’s replacementafter its success in presenting the president with Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“I see the idea of the court as an honest broker has been diminishing and what I would predict—given the list of people Trump will nominate—is that that will be exacerbated,” said Kalhan.
But the court may not move too aggressively to remake American society. Peter Irons, an emeritus political science professor at UC San Diego, said that he has faith that Chief Justice John Roberts’s sense of his legacy will mean he won’t want bring too much controversy to the court. That’s why Irons doesn’t see a Roberts court, even one with a hard-right majority, overturning “bedrock decisions” for gay marriage and abortion.
Concerns over social issues like gay rights and abortion may well be overblown, Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told me. That’s not to say the concerns aren’t real, Somin said, but the future of the court is unsure and there may be some parts of a prospective justice’s belief system that even intense Federalist Society vetting won’t catch.
As for how that could play out? Well, first of all, Somin said that he thinks even a court with a hard-right majority may be open to upholding Roe. And the 2015 ruling on gay marriage seems unlikely to be overruled, though Somin did warn that there could be some restrictions that stop short of an outright ban.
Melissa Powers, a law professor at Oregon’s Lewis and Clark University, envisions many questions about civil rights becoming state, rather than federal, issues. If Roe is overturned, for example, that may open the door to opportunities for blue states to enact far-reaching social legislation even as GOP-led states are emboldened to restrict rights. The upside, Powers said, is that left-leaning legislation at the state level could be given the same leeway. “A lot of the potential candidates [for the court] will be sympathetic to states’ rights,” said Powers.
But there are policy issues that the planet can’t afford to wait on.
It’s unlikely the federal government will do much to address climate change under Trump, for instance, and Kennedy’s replacement is likely to be more hostile toward environmental regulations, according to Powers. Kennedy was a swing vote on a couple of cases where he joined the liberal justices in ruling in favor of climate hawks, she added. Whoever Trump nominates to replace Kennedy will assuredly be much more hostile to the environment.
“If you have a justice who is very eager to not allow for environmental regulation, they could go in and look to restrict the federal regulations,” said Powers.
The only thing that’s for sure, said Somin, is that we have no way to predict the new justice’s effect on the court and the country. We likely won’t for many years to come.
Green Energy is located in Wood Hall.

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