Among the many awful decisions from SCOTUS this year, one that largely flew under the radar was Ohio v EPA where the court granted a stay blocking (temporarily at least) EPA from adopting tighter standards under its Good Neighbor policy addressing the impacts of pollution in upwind states on their downwind neighbors. It was a bad decision, and hardly a surprise for a Court so openly in thrall to corporate anti-regulation interests (though Barrett joining the dissent was a bit surprising to me).
What caught my eye more recently was that SCOTUS reissued its Ohio decision on June 27th with corrections, after it was pointed out that Justice Gorsuch had at multiple times referred to nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) rather than nitrogen oxides, commonly called NOx, the subject of EPA's regulatory effort at issue in the case, and an important pollution source contributing to acid rain and human health impacts. When people with some actual knowledge of the subject pointed out the error, the Court issued a corrected opinion.
From Forbes:
The court revised its opinion in Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 5-4 ruling released Thursday in which the court temporarily blocked an EPA policy requiring “upwind” states to reduce air pollution that travels down to “downwind” states and affects the air quality there.
Gorsuch—and his clerks, who would have helped prepare the opinion—referred five times in his opinion to “nitrous oxide,” which is a greenhouse gas that’s more commonly known as an anesthetic and referred to as “laughing gas.”
With no appreciation of the irony, just one day later, SCOTUS issued its opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturning the longstanding Chevron precedent, under which courts granted significant deference to agency expertise within their field when looking at rulemaking where the underlying statute is ambiguous. The court took unto itself the role of expert, substituting its judgments for those reached by agency specialists charged with implementing complex laws and associated regulations. The majority opinion read:
Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided
because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory
ambiguities. Courts do.
Yes, it does take a special kind of "competence" to conflate NOx pollution with laughing gas when considering implementation of the Clean Air Act.
SCOTUS' arrogance is truly staggering - and matched only by its bias and corruption.