President Trump has declared war on environmentalists and the environment.
This morning, as his first major assault on the environment, he approved the Keystone and Dakota pipelines with a pen stroke. Then, when a reporter asked him about Native American and other protesters opposing the Dakota pipeline, and the threat the pipeline poses to human drinking water supplies, he turned away and refused to answer.
This afternoon it emerged that Neil Gorsuch is Trump’s leading candidate to replace the late Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court. Here is how Think Progress sizes up Gorsuch and the implications of his nomination:
“In the waning years of Obama’s presidency, Federalist Society events grew increasingly fixated on limiting federal agencies’ authority to take regulatory action of any kind. Often, they focused their ire on the Supreme Court’s venerable Chevron doctrine, which holds that courts should generally defer to agencies when the law authorizing a regulation is ambiguous, and typically should only strike down such regulation if the law clearly does not permit the agency’s action to move forward.
“Gorsuch may be the judiciary’s most vocal proponent of the Federalist Society’s crusade. … The practical impact of a court decision overruling Chevron would be a significant shift in power from a branch of government that is elected, the executive, to a branch that is not, the judiciary. … In such a world, it would matter even more which party controls the Supreme Court. Rather than deferring to rules pushed by a Democratic administration, a Republican Court would be free to strike these rules down. Meanwhile, the same Court would be free to uphold every single regulation pushed by a Republican administration.”
(Read article here; for a broader review of Gorsuch’s positions on various issues, see this article.) There, in a nutshell, is Trump’s second major assault on the environment, and on people’s health and welfare to the extent it depends on regulation pollution. The message is clear: Trump doesn’t give a damn about the environment, or the people who want to protect it.
This isn’t the Supreme Court fight many liberals were expecting. It won’t be about abortion, at least not overtly; so far as I can determine, Gorsuch’s views on abortion are somewhat an unknown quantity. The late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly attacked Gorsuch for not being pro-life enough, which prompted the conservative opinion magazine National Review to defend him in this article, but even NR couldn’t vouch for him as a reliable anti-abortion, and attempted to appease its readers with rationalizations in that direction.
So, Gorsuch’s nomination might not be the anti-abortion horror story that women’s activists feared. But it most certainly will be an anti-environmentalist horror story that few people saw coming.