Judge (Justice?) Roberts

The Sierra Club's lawyers have been sifting through the legal opinions of Judge Roberts, and the picture that emerges is quite alarming.

He was one of the few judges who thought that Vice-President Cheney should be allowed to keep the proceedings of his Energy Task Force secret as a matter of right (Sierra Club v. Cheney). He didn't think the EPA should have to take into account the health effects of arsenic, lead and cadmium from smelters (Sierra Club v. EPA). He didn't think the District of Columbia should be able to prohibit the shipment of tank cars full of deadly chlorine gas right past the U.S. Capitol, even though he admitted that there could be "calamitous consequences of a terrorist attack on a rail car transporting Banned Materials through the District" (CSX Transportation, Inc. v. Williams). When the federal government refused to promulgate an effective plan to protect Atlanta blue-fin tuna, Roberts deferred to the bureaucracy, even though he admitted that the tuna faced "a significant risk of extinction or stock collapse" (National Audubon Society v. Evans).

Although Roberts does not look like an ideological extremist, when faced with a close call between public health and the environment and economic interests, he makes the close calls on behalf of regulated industries. When faced with a close call as to whether all Americans should be protected by the national government, or whether some Americans should have a lower level of protection because of the politics of a given state, he makes that close call against protecting everyone. Should regulatory agencies be required to provide the full level of protection envisaged by Congress? Roberts comes down on the side of allowing them to compromise what Congress has promised.