Fact-checking belies Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh's claims about his judicial record on environmental cases.
"Brett Kavanaugh has made any number of claims that defy belief: that spicy food, and not drinking, caused him to vomit in high school, for instance; or that he called himself a “Renate Alumnius” in his high school yearbook as a tribute to the girl in question, and not as a boast that he’d had sex with her. While such questionable statements set off the b.s. detectors of pretty much anyone who has attended high school, they are hard to definitively disprove. Kavanaugh’s claims about giving environmental issues a fair shake while on the court, on the other hand, can be easily fact-checked against the judicial record. And when they are, they come up short.
When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 5, Kavanaugh listed several cases in which he upheld environmental regulations, including “the Natural Resources Defense Council case versus EPA, a ruling for environmentalist groups,” as he put it.
Yet, in that case, which was decided by the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2014, Kavanaugh ruled against three of four challenges brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. The judge rejected the environmental groups’ primary argument that the Environmental Protection Agency’s limits on lead, arsenic, chromium, and soot pollution from cement plants were too weak. He also rejected another legal challenge the groups posed to the EPA’s pollution limits. And Kavanaugh’s ruling also sided with industry in giving cement companies a two-year extension to pollute above the limits that the environmental groups already felt were too weak. It was only on one procedural point that Kavanaugh agreed with environmentalists — one that wasn’t “especially environmental,” according to John Walke, a senior attorney for NRDC, who argued the case in front of Kavanaugh."
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