5th Amendment = Right to a Climate System

[snoscythe]

A federal judge in Oregon announced last week that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution includes “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” Not only that, but it’s a fundamental right, which means that government action affecting those rights is subject to the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

Wowza.

Unsurprisingly, the judge got there following the logic Justice Kennedy used to find the constitutional right to gay marriage, illustrating just how slippery that slope is proving to be.

This discovery of a new fundamental right to a climate means that any governmental action that affects the climate is now subject to judicial review to see if it infringes on that right (under a strict scrutiny standard), and that plaintiffs can get $$ from the government if they win.

That open seat on the Supreme Court just got that much more important with nutjob federal justices like this out there.

[BoiseBYU]

Horrible jurisprudence. That is what happens when a court untethers itself from the Constitutional language we have and arrogates to itself the power to constitutionalize what it considers important policy choices. Roe v. Wade redux.