Posted on 08/15/2013 4:33:09 PM PDT by neverdem
President Obama asserted the unilateral power to "tweak" inconvenient laws in last Friday's news conference, underscoring his Administration's increasingly cavalier notions about law enforcement. So it's good that the judiciary—a coequal branch of government, in case the Administration forgot—is starting to check the White House.
In a major rebuke on Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an unusual writ of mandamus, which is a direct judicial order compelling the government to fulfill a legal obligation. This "extraordinary remedy" is nominally about nuclear waste, writes Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the 2-1 majority, yet the case "raises significant questions about the scope of the Executive's authority to disregard federal statutes."
In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1983 requires that the NRC "shall consider" the license application for the repository and "shall issue a final decision approving or disapproving" it within three years of submission.
Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.
Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
So the judge wrote a strongly worded letter...
Hopefully there will be much more coming.
Maybe the House can get a clue from the judicial branch.
This extra-legal crap from nobama has got to stop.
“He made his ruling, now let him enforce it!”
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Thanks neverdem.
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