The Jury is Out: Has the Supreme Court Just Shredded the Environmental Policymaking Safety Net?

Equal Justice Under Law - the pediment of the Supreme Court bulding, Washington, DC (by Thomas Hawk CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

Remember what it was like as a kid when a grownup told you “Because I said so”?

Well, a newly constituted majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has recently flexed its ideological muscle, upending 50 years of precedent guiding its decisions, and basically told us “Because I said so.”

This quiet revolution by an activist majority, deciding cases based on primarily political grounds rather than on the constraints of facts and legal precedent, will have grave impact on environmental policymaking – as well civil rights, healthcare, safety, education, elections, technology, finance, and economics…