Judge again stands up to Trump’s unilateral moves

Bill Knight column for 7-4, 5 or 6, 2019

When federal Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. last week ruled that President Trump couldn’t build parts of a border wall in Arizona, California and New Mexico by using billions of dollars from the Defense and Treasury departments appropriated for other purposes, it continued a series of decisions Gilliam has made blocking Trump’s attempts to circumvent Congress.

One of Gilliam’s actions stemmed from Illinois and other states suing over Trump’s attempts to delay standards to better control greenhouse gases produced by decomposing contents in landfills.

Gilliam, 51, of the U.S. District Court of Northern California, is a former federal prosecutor approved to the bench by the Senate in 2014. He’s stood up to Trump’s controversial, often unilateral actions before.

In January, the Oakland judge partially blocked administration rules that would’ve permitted employers claiming moral objections to opt out of covering women’s birth control as part of Affordable Care Act health-insurance plans, and in May he blocked work from starting about 50 miles of wall construction.

Friday’s ruling concerned Trump wanting to take $3.6 billion from military construction funds, $2.5 billion from Pentagon counter-drug efforts, and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset-forfeiture program to build a few sections of his wall.

“All President Trump has succeeded in building is a constitutional crisis,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led Attorneys General from 20 states in that lawsuit.

That followed another suit by Illinois and eight additional states demanding that a 2016 landfill-gas rule be enacted despite repeated delays by Trump’s EPA.

Landfill materials release methane and carbon dioxide, key contributors to climate change, and three years ago Obama’s EPA issued guidelines for landfills to improve gas management, which can generate electricity and produce compressed natural gas for fuel. That previous EPA’s cost/benefit analysis showed “estimated climate benefits of the methane and carbon dioxide reductions in the final rules significantly outweigh costs. The rules are estimated to yield more than $8 in benefits for every dollar spent to comply.”

Regardless, the Trump administration has stalled reforms, so Illinois, California, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont went to court.

Trump’s foot-dragging was “only the latest in a series of EPA’s efforts to do what it is not allowed to do: Stay the guidelines while it reconsiders them,” the Attorneys General said in that suit, filed in January. “EPA’s history of using improper procedural mechanisms to avoid implementing the guidelines raises serious concerns about the agency’s compliance with law, and the integrity of its rationale.”

Indeed, government lawyers defending the delays didn’t dispute charges that EPA shirked its obligations, instead focusing on whether the states had legal standing to bring the case since, the government argued, there was no proof that inaction harmed these states.

However, EPA scientists originally estimated that the guidelines would cut 285,000 metric tons per year of methane plus 1,995 tons of non-methane organic compounds, including volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants.

“There is overwhelming and ever-growing evidence of the need for immediate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions,” Attorneys General noted. “These emissions are the equivalent of more than 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, the annual equivalent of the greenhouse gases emitted by more than 1.5 million cars.

“The function of the delay is to enable EPA to avoid implementing the landfill emission guidelines … while it works to revise – and likely weaken – them,” the Attorneys General said.

Gilliam agreed, ruling that the guidelines should take effect.

Trump’s EPA says it’s reviewing the landfill-gas ruling, and Trump – calling the latest wall decision “a disgrace” – said his administration will turn to the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, maybe this week.

Like Trump’s recent criticism, the President reacted to the EPA ruling by calling Gilliam an “activist, Obama-appointed judge.”

Besides being nominated by Obama, Gilliam did donate $6,900 to Obama’s 2008 campaign and $14,500 to his 2012 reelection bid, according to the Federal Election Commission. However, he Gilliam was indirectly defended by conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who rebuked critics of an independent judiciary based on who nominated them.

“We do not have ‘Obama judges’ or ‘Trump judges,’ ‘Bush judges’ or ‘Clinton judges’,” Roberts said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal rights to those appearing before them.”