A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot require Louisiana to use race-based metrics to evaluate permitting decisions, writing that “pollution does not discriminate.”
Louisiana objected in its May 2023 lawsuit to the EPA’s insistence that the state conduct a “disparate-impact” analysis on a Clean Air Act permit, arguing that officials lost sight of the agency’s mission and “instead decided to moonlight as a social justice warriors fixated on race.” The judge agreed that the disparate impact analysis mandated by the EPA under Title VI “creates a race-based decision.”
“Where an action would have a disparate impact, a decision-maker is often compelled to act intentionally on the basis of racial considerations to avoid the disparate impact … thus disparate impact regulations require decision makers ‘to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes,'” U.S. District Court Judge James Cain, Jr., a Trump appointee, wrote.
Cain issued an injunction temporarily blocking the EPA and Department of Justice (DOJ) from using Title VI to enforce disparate impact requirements unless ratified by the president and based on the EPA’s disparate impact regulations. (RELATED: Judge Declines To Block Race-Based Admissions At US Naval Academy)
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 16: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) logo is displayed on a door at its headquarters on March 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“The public interest here is that governmental agencies abide by its laws, and treat all of its citizens equally, without considering race,” the judge wrote. “To be sure, if a decision maker has to consider race, to decide, it has indeed participated in racism.”
He found that complying with the analysis would impose significant costs on Louisiana, as well as creating concern for other states.
“It is abundantly clear, that Defendants’ actions iterated herein have created great cause for concern, not only for the State of Louisiana, but also for our sister states who have also found themselves at the whim of the EPA and its overreaching mandates,” the judge wrote.
The EPA referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to the DOJ.
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