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by alexsereno 812 days ago
This exactly, the 5th has the wildest and most twisted rulings to the point even the current Supreme Court has slapped a few down. Any reasonable person should be skeptical.
2 comments

For anybody interested the 5th isn't the worst court. Here is a summary

https://ballotpedia.org/SCOTUS_case_reversal_rates_(2007_-_P...

Well judging how bad a court is by how many times this Supreme Court reverses it isn’t the best metric, that would require the SC to be a fair and reasonable actor
You were the one who brought up that the rulings of the 5th were slapped down as some sort of argument about the quality of their rulings.
The point was that SCOTUS is heavily partisan and still finds errors even they couldn't stomach.

This was obvious.

Sorry for the confusion there, but I bought that up as a point that their rulings have been so bad that even the current, extremely partial SC, has been forced by the politics of the situation to slap down their rulings. It’s as if your own friends tell you you’ve gone a bit too far.
The 5th Circuit has the highest percentage of cases reversed among circuits with more than 2 cases reviewed by SCOTUS.

If that's not the worst, how do you define worst?

The 4th circuit has 100% reversal rating with over 2 cases reviewed.
This notion of devaluing the judiciary just because they don't judge the way you want is precisely how rule of law is eroded and societies eventually wither and die.

If you bothered to read the ruling, you would learn that the EPA specifically exempted ongoing processes as of and after 2015 under Section 5. This obviously exempts Inhance's fluorination process and is in line with Section 5's wording.

You would also learn that the EPA did not include fluorination among its list of things to regulate.

The EPA then cited those regulations under Section 5 to order Inhance to stop their decades-old fluorination process.

That is simply bullshit, that is pulling regulations out of thin air. Note that the court explicitly cites Section 6 is what the EPA should use to regulate PFOA, which the court explicitly says is by itself not wrong.

Any reasonable person should read the ruling and most likely be applauding the court for bringing a misguided executive agency into line, because the United States of America is a country governed by rule of law and the EPA in this instance did not follow due process.

No, devaluing the 5th because they regularly have completely insane takes is logical. They regularly twist legal frameworks for completely out of pocket takes. Criticizing government actors instead of blindly trusting every ruling without reading it is how democracy functions and grows. If you’re so upset over that, you probably need to re evaluate if you should live in a country where citizens get to distrust their government. That’s exactly the foundation of this one.
>Criticizing government actors instead of blindly trusting every ruling without reading it is how democracy functions and grows.

I did read the ruling[1], and unless the ruling is straight up perjury the EPA dropped the ball.

Criticizing the court for not ruling the way you wanted, and presumably without reading the ruling because you're grossly disregarding their value, is unreasonable and erodes rule of law.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876314

>a country where citizens get to distrust their government.

And the court called out the government (the EPA) for being unworthy of trust in this instance.

Yes, the ruling is straight up judicial perjury. It deliberately misstates the statutory language to create a regulatory conflict where non exists.

Indeed, the court is taking a non-binding FAQ on the EPA website, and treating that as more legally constraining on the EPA than the actual regulations they issue. That's f'ing ridiculous.

And to make things more ridiculous, they created a binding implication, where non actually existed in the proposed language that the 2015 exemption would not apply to ongoing uses.

The EPA themselves defined "new use" with regards to PFAS as any manufacturing or process not ongoing as of and after 2015, as cited in the ruling:

>In response to growing concerns about PFAS, the EPA proposed a new SNUR in January 2015, “designating as a significant new use manufacturing . . . or processing of an identified subset of [PFAS] for any use that will not be ongoing after December 31, 2015, and all other [PFAS] for which there are currently no ongoing uses.”

>The proposed rule also made clear that the SNUR would apply only to “any use not ongoing as of the date on which this proposed rule is published.” Id.

So not only are the EPA aware of what Section 5's "new use" language means and tried to twist it during enforcement, they ignored their own very specific definition to try and regulate Inhance.

That is what the courts are telling to EPA to stop doing. The courts are ordering the EPA to cite the appropriate law and write appropriate regulations following due process first, otherwise known as Section 6, in order to regulate Inhance and their fluorination process which the court reaffirms is something the EPA can do.

No, the issue is that the language you are quoting is a gross misstatement of what the EPA actually did.

They clarified the definition of "new use", but PFAS was already covered by the "new use" as defined in the statute.

Ergo, judicial perjury.

>This notion of devaluing the judiciary just because they don't judge the way you want is precisely how rule of law is eroded and societies eventually wither and die.

That's not what anyone said though. There's a difference between disagreeing and being unreasonable. Here, you too are being unreasonable because you've purposefully skipped past this in order to twist this even more politically.