Despite prevailing in a court fight to stop an EPA civil rights probe of the state’s environmental permitting practices, Louisiana’s top lawyer is again angling to gut the underlying regulations nationwide.
Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) in a Thursday filing said that U.S. District Judge James Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana must vacate EPA’s rules related to “disparate” environmental effects in the wake of a decision last month by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In that ruling, related to a Labor Department rule on pay for tipped employees, a three-judge panel found that the rule suffered from an irremediable “fundamental substantive defect” and therefore must be scrapped.
Because Cain has found that EPA “disparate impact mandates” are similarly flawed, he is now bound by the 5th Circuit’s precedent to throw them out, lawyers for Murrill’s office wrote in Thursday’s motion.
