administrations

April 17 (UPI) — A federal judge on Friday blocked a lawsuit against the state of Hawaii that the federal government filed to prevent it from suing oil companies.

The Department of Justice last year sued Hawaii to stop a suit against fossil fuel companies for the impact of climate change on the state, but Senior Judge Helen Gillmor of the U.S. District Court in Hawaii said they it has no standing, The Hill and The New York Times reported.

In the ruling, Gillmor said that an “abstract, theoretical future harm” is not a valid basis for a lawsuit because stating an intention to file suit — which the state’s governor declared on television that he planned to do — does not amount to “concrete harm” that would allow an entity to sue.

Gillmor blocked the lawsuit because the DOJ’s theory of harm would require predicting claims brought against unknown companies; predicting that the lawsuit would be successful; “guessing” that oil companies would react in specific way; and then hypothesizing that the reaction would somehow harm the United States’ commerce and future energy policy, she wrote in the 30-page decision.

The DOJ’s suit, which was filed by now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi, alleged that Hawaii’s action was a “burdensome and ideologically motivated” lawsuit that could cause “crippling damages” with the energy and climate policies the state allegedly is pursuing.

“We disagree with the Hawaii District Court’s ruling, which ignored Supreme Court precedent regarding the United States’ interest in the supremacy of federal law,” the DOJ’s principal deputy assistant attorney general Adam Gustafson said in a statement. “We are exploring all options.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump has notched a string of wins on the Supreme Court ’s emergency docket, in part because the conservative justices believe that blocking executive policies is a blow that can’t be easily fixed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday.

The increase in emergency appeals by the Trump administration is “unprecedented in the court’s history,” she said in a speech at the University of Alabama School of Law.

The high court sided with the Trump administration in about two dozen decisions last year, often lifting the orders of lower court judges who found their policies were likely illegal on topics as diverse as immigration and steep federal funding cuts.

While designed to be short-term, those orders have largely allowed Trump to move ahead for now with key parts of his sweeping agenda.

The emergency docket, which is made up of appeals seeking quick intervention from the justices in cases that are still playing out in lower courts, is itself a source of disagreement among the justices. That spilled into public view when two other justices, liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Brett M. Kavanaugh, publicly sparred over the emergency docket in an unusual exchange last month.

Sotomayor has disagreed with many of the decisions in Trump’s favor, but the conservatives who form the court’s majority often reason that blocking those policies — or laws passed by Congress — causes legal harm that can’t be easily fixed, she said. It’s a bar that’s tough for the other side to overcome, even for plaintiffs like immigrants who could be newly exposed to deportation or states where schools are losing teacher-training funding.

“If you start with the presumption that there is irreparable harm to one side, then you’re going to have more grants of emergency relief. Because the other side is going to have a much harder time,” she said. “It has changed the paradigm on the court.”

Her comments provided a window into the Supreme Court decisions that are often released with little explanation. While many emergency docket orders have gone Trump’s way, the court also struck down his sweeping tariffs, a central plank of his economic platform, after a longer process of full briefing and oral arguments.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.