Last month a federal district judge in Wyoming invalidated an Interior Department rule setting stricter standards for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking,” in commin parlance) on public lands. The decision dealt a blow to the Obama administration’s environmental agenda, and news coverage focused on that. But the decision was also notable for how the judge in the case, Stephen Skavdahl, saw the law—especially since he is an Obama appointee. While you might think that an Obama judge would do the president’s bidding, or at least “defer” to the administration’s judgment, that did not happen in Wyoming v. U.S. Department of Interior.
Skavdahl said the issue in the case was whether Congress has “delegated its legal authority to the Department of Interior to regulate hydraulic fracturing.” The issue was not, he added, “whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States.” Hence his job: “to interpret the applicable statutory enactments and determine whether Congress has delegated” to Interior the necessary legal authority. “It has not,” he concluded.
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management issued the regulation. Like other agencies, it is, wrote Skavdahl, a
Nor was Skavdahl receptive to the administration’s executive unilateralism in this case: “Congress’ inability or unwillingness to pass a law desired by the executive branch does not default authority to the executive branch to act independently, regardless of whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States.” Skavdahl cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Mistretta v. United States regarding the “central judgment of the Framers of the Constitution.” Which is that “within our political scheme, the separation of . . . powers into three coordinate branches is essential to the preservation of liberty.”
Skavdahl left no doubt about his ruling: “Congress has not delegated to the Department of Interior the authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing. The BLM’s effort to do so through the Fracking Rule is in excess of its statutory authority and contrary to law.” Thus did the judge strike a blow for freedom.
At a moment when the president’s policies on greenhouse gas emissions, immigration, and “net neutrality” are under attack in the federal courts, often a D.C. Circuit that President Obama packed with his own judges, the strongest statement against administration overreach comes from a mere district judge appointed by Obama himself.
Meanwhile, the administration has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
