Earlier this week, in a culmination of a decade-long fight, James Cain, a federal judge in Louisiana who was appointed by president Trump, decided to block the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice from pursuing enforcement actions based on “disparate impacts” — or the idea that a regulation might disproportionately harm one group of people over another.
A provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies and programs that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Since the EPA’s founding in 1970, however, the agency allowed most of the Title VI complaints that it received to languish without resolution. In 2015, a coalition of community groups in Louisiana, with the assistance of the public-interest environmental law organization Earthjustice, sued the agency for this practice and won. Five years later, after president Biden took office, federal regulators finally began addressing the civil rights complaints they received and the EPA announced a civil-rights probe into Cancer... Read more
