Whales 1, Bush 0

I haven't commented much on Bush's environmental policies, mostly because they're so reprehensible as to defy commentary -- the outrage factor goes off the scale, leaving me, for a change, speechless.

Here's some good news (thanks to Nicole Bell at C&L):

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Navy must protect endangered whales from the potentially lethal effects of underwater sonar during anti-submarine training off the Southern California coast, rejecting President Bush's attempt to exempt the exercises from environmental laws.

In a Friday night ruling rushed into print ahead of the next scheduled exercise on Monday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal judge's decision that no emergency existed that would justify Bush's intervention.

The Navy is engaged in "long-planned, routine training exercises" and has had ample time to take the steps that the law requires - conduct a thorough review of the environmental consequences and propose effective measures to minimize the harm to whales and other marine mammals, the three-judge panel said.

The court noted that the Navy has been conducting similar exercises for years, has agreed in the past to restrictions like the ones it is now challenging, and was sued by environmental groups in the current case nearly a year ago. The lower-court judge reviewed the evidence and found nothing to support the Navy's claim that the protective measures would interfere with vital training or hamper national security, the court said.

It should be patently obvious that animals that rely on sound for communication and navigation are going to be affected by sonar. Bush's response? "National security," which the court quite rightly found to be bullshit.

He also tried to declare the Navy above the law -- big surprise! -- after an earlier ruling on this case from the district court in Los Angeles:

The president's Jan. 15 order said the restrictions would interfere with training that was "essential to national security."

But the appeals court said that federal regulations in place since 1978 allow a president to override the environmental law only in an emergency, and that the administration had failed to demonstrate any "sudden unanticipated events" had occurred in this case.

Bush's actions were also constitutionally questionable, the court said, because he cited no evidence that Cooper had not already reviewed, but instead merely disagreed with her conclusions. Under the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, "it was the job of the appellate court, and not the executive branch," to decide whether the judge erred, said Judge Betty Fletcher in the court ruling.

As might be expected, Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has posted on this story some while back. He had, I think, the right take on the motivation for this ploy:

Last summer I reported earlier that something was afoot with the administration regarding the sonar policy:

One thing I've learned from watching this administration is that when it breaks well-established norms, and then tries to pretend that doing so is normal, it's all a pretense to cover something devious in the offing. Think of the case of the eight fired U.S. attorneys, an action that reflected the White House's now-evident determination to politicize the Justice Department.

In this case, the administration is short-circuiting the normal hearing process -- typically, the public is given 60 to 90 days for comment, not 14 -- because it's self-evident that it is determined to deploy its deadly new sonar in the Puget Sound, the public -- and the wildlife -- be damned. What ulterior motives lie beneath that are hard to discern.

Well, I think we can see what those motives were now: To keep the "unitary presidency" ball moving forward, expanding its purview to even environmental policy.

The goal is simply to create a presidency that is the sole arm of government. It's impacted the rest of our policies badly. Why should we think that Bush has any sympathy for the environment?