Judging Phyllis

Last Friday U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton struck down the US Forest Service’s 2005 Final NFMA Planning Rule. The Planning Rule allowed National Forests to create Forest Plans without going through the NEPA process of writing an environmental impact statement (EIS) for each Forest Plan.

The San Francisco-based judge ruled in favor of 15 environmental litigants who argued that USFS Forest Plans should be subject to endless lawsuits over NEPA minutia. NEPA lawsuits are the backbone of the Enviro Litigation Movement.

The US Dept. of Justice argued, on behalf of the USFS, that only specific projects should require EIS’s. Forest Plans are general in nature and do not specify projects. Endless lawsuits over vague and non-specific Forest Plans cripple the ability of the USFS to do anything other than burn forests down. The 2005 Planning Rule dealt with that problem by exempting Forest Plans from NEPA. Only major projects, once specified, were to get the EIS treatment. For more on the 2005 Planning Rule see (here).

The judge, however, thought otherwise, and struck down the 2005 Rule. She provided no guidance on USFS planning, except to reject the Rule. As a consequence, USFS planning may be a thing of the past. Although required by the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), Forest Plans are an empty exercise for all but NEPA lawyers.

It’s hard to say how Judge Hamilton’s ruling will affect actual land management. Currently, watching wildland fires burn is about all the USFS can do without an EIS. They can’t even mow the lawns at the Ranger Stations without one. However, whoofoos (wildland fire use fires) don’t require EIS’s.

That’s right; no NEPA needed for whoofoos.

So we look for no change in the USFS. That agency ground to halt in 1994 and has been in zombie-mode ever since. All they can do is burn, baby, burn.

Judge Phyllis Hamilton is famous for her weird rulings. She was the SF judge who made partial birth abortion legal again:

Judge strikes down Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act

By: ALICIA LEUPP, The California Aggie, 6/7/04 (here)

In a nationally controversial decision, U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton became the first to strike down the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act on Tuesday.

The San Francisco federal judge ruled that the act is unconstitutional on the grounds that it infringes on a woman’s right to choose, and banned enforcement of the act at all of Planned Parenthood’s roughly 900 national clinics as well as San Francisco General Hospital.

In a 117-page ruling, Hamilton said that the act violates the Constitution in three ways, including unnecessarily vague language, by placing an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions and lacking a required exception for medical procedures conducted to preserve women’s health.

“We were obviously very happy with the decision,” said Dana Williamson, associate vice president for public affairs at Planned Parenthood’s Mar Monte Clinic in Sacramento. “It sent a clear message to the Bush administration that the courts will not tolerate attempted invasion into personal life.”

Twice vetoed by President Clinton, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban was signed into law by President Bush in November of 2003. The act prohibits the procedure known to doctors as intact dilation and extraction, in which the fetus is partially removed from the womb and its skull is punctured or cracked.

Alicia failed to add that after the baby’s skull is cracked, its brains are sucked out. Some people, like the US Congress and the President, think there ought to be a law against that kind of treatment of newborn babies. But not Judge Hamilton. She thinks baby brain sucking is cool, and your right to suck out your baby’s brains is protected by the US Constitution, in the famous Baby Brain Sucking Amendment, or somewhere.

And in 2005 Judge Hamilton ruled that middle school students in Michigan should be forced to undergo Islamic immersion:

Erasing Christianity

By Jon Christian Ryter, December 31, 2005, NewsWithViews.com (see here)

In July, 2002, the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan filed a 1st Amendment lawsuit on behalf of Jonas and Tiffany Eklund and their children, Chase and Samantha who attended the Excelsior Middle School in the Byron Union School District for its “Islamic simulation” program when Christian children were forced to dress like Muslims and memorize Islamic scriptures … to wear Islamic garb, pretend they were Muslim, memorize verses from the Qu’ran and play “jihad” games…

… US District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton decided in a 22-page ruling that the school system was not indoctrinating students about Islam when it required them to adopt Islamic names, dress in Islamic garb and memorize and recite Islamic prayers and Qu’ranic scriptures. Yet, students in almost every public school system in America are banned from using the word Christmas because the name “Christ” is included in the word.

… Judge Hamilton, who was an administrative law judge in the Clinton bureaucracy with no trial experience, was placed on the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 2000.

Judge Phyllis Hamilton is not what we would call Main Stream, but then we live in rural Oregon, not San Francisco. So what do we know? If the good people of the Big Cities, the Federal Judiciary, and the Executive Branch wish to burn America’s forests to the ground, who are we to call them eco-Nazi, anti-American, anti-human, baby-killing, forest-incinerating, arsonist-terrorist, brain-dead, sub-human scum?

No sir, it’s not our place as simple American peasants to say that kind of stuff, and so we will not say such things about our Glorious Leaders, and we strongly condemn those who do.