{"id":177843,"date":"2019-05-25T19:28:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-26T00:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/25\/stupid-judge-tricks\/"},"modified":"2019-05-25T19:28:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-26T00:28:00","slug":"stupid-judge-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/25\/stupid-judge-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Stupid Judge Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>I approve of the US Court of Appeals of the 4<sup>th<\/sup> circuit&#8217;s opinion <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/12\/14\/676950106\/quoting-the-lorax-court-pulls-permit-for-pipeline-crossing-appalachian-trail\">revoking the permit of a pipeline that crosses the Appalachian Trail<\/a>, but I&#8217;m less sanguine of their invoking Dr. Seuss:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A federal appeals court has thrown out a power company&#8217;s permit to build a natural gas pipeline across two national forests and the Appalachian Trail \u2013 and slammed the U.S. Forest Service for granting the approvals in the first place. <\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.southernenvironment.org\/uploads\/words_docs\/ACP_USFS_opinion.pdf\">a decision<\/a> filed Thursday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., a three-judge panel declared the U.S. Forest Service &#8220;abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources&#8221; when it issued permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to build through parts of the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests and a right of way across the Appalachian Trail. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This conclusion,&#8221; they wrote in a unanimous judgment, &#8220;is particularly informed by the Forest Service&#8217;s serious environmental concerns that were suddenly, and mysteriously, assuaged in time to meet a private pipeline company&#8217;s deadlines.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p><b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">The judges cited Dr. Seuss&#8217; <i>The Lorax<\/i>: &#8220;We trust the United States Forest Service to &#8216;speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.'&#8221;<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<i>emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, Dr. Seuss?<\/p>\n<p>I know that the law is sometimes dry, but the judges are overcompensating here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I approve of the US Court of Appeals of the 4th circuit&#8217;s opinion revoking the permit of a pipeline that crosses the Appalachian Trail, but I&#8217;m less sanguine of their invoking Dr. Seuss: A federal appeals court has thrown out a power company&#8217;s permit to build a natural gas pipeline across two national forests and &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[484,407,555,437],"class_list":["post-177843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-environment","tag-justice","tag-literature","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177843"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}