Hacktacular!
By Another good one to put in the files explaining why Scalia is America’s most overrated judge:
Justice Scalia’s dissent is a bit peculiar. It begins, as Ann noted, with a concern about unelected agency officials making policy rather than Congress. Since Scalia is a big fan of executive power, that seems a little odd coming from him. In addition, as he surely must know, the White House is very much involved in regulations of this importance, so the transport rule wasn’t exactly under the control of unelected agency workers.
Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted. This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.”
Scalia may want to spend a little less time listening to Glenn Beck and a little more time editing the work of his Federalist Society gremlins.