Sotomayor’s ‘Empathy’ For Extreme Green Groups Would Have Cost Americans Billions

Empathy.  Who doesn’t want some?

I mean, I suppose that some part of me, as a conservative, would love for some judge to come along and say, “There, there.  I’ll make sure those mean Democrats don’t do stuff you don’t want.  I’ll overturn the election.”

Only that isn’t the direction the “empathy river” flows, is it?  It’s a manure river that springs and flows from the radical left and routinely runs its banks to flood over conservatives.

In the case of Sonia Sotomayor, that crap river has run pretty deep and pretty wide.  It has run over white firefighters who made the mistake of playing by the rules against a racially-biased system increasingly geared to flood over them.  And in the case of Sotomayor, it is a river that would have flooded over every single American to the tune of billions of dollars had the Supreme Court not reversed her decision.

If Sotomayor gets appointed to the Supreme Court, you can bet that THIS crap river will be flowing over you soon:

Sotomayor Ruling Could Have Cost Consumers Billions

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
By: Phil Brennan

A decision rendered by Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, fortunately reversed by the Supreme Court on April 1, 2009, could have been extravagantly costly to American consumers, according to the Steve Milloy’s authoritative Junkscience.Com.

Charging that her nomination represents a potential threat to U.S. Consumers and to the economy in terms of energy and the environment, Milloy reported on her 2007 Second Circuit decision in Riverkeeper, Inc. V. EPA 475 F. 3d 83′

Milloy wrote that in her ruling Judge Sotomayor sided with “extreme green groups” who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency because the agency permitted cost-benefit analysis to be used in the determination of environmental protection technology for power plant cooling water intake structures.

Cost benefit analysis involves the balancing of the total expected costs of a proposal or project against its total expected benefits in order to determine its economic feasibility. Do the benefits outweigh or justify the cost?

According to Milloy, had the EPA been required to abide by Judge Sotomayor’s decision, U.S. Consumers would have been forced to pay billions of dollars more in energy costs every year as power plants producing more than one-half of the nation’s electricity would have had to undertake expensive retrofits.”

Noting that President Obama said he wanted somebody “who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and a practical sense of how the world works,” Milloy said that in the Riverkeeper case Sotomayor didn’t display too much of a “common touch” and “practical sense” when it came to the cost-benefit analysis.

Senators, Milloy advised, should probe whether Judge Sotomayor “lacks the common-sense realization that the benefits of environmental regulation ought to outweigh its costs — a worldview with ominous implications given the nation’s present rush toward cap-and-tax global warming regulation and other green mindlessness.”

What is truly sad, truly pathetic, and truly laughable (in a hysterical-laughing-into-a-crying-jag-whilest-curled-up-in-a-fetal-position sort of way) is that Americans have already said, “Please, sir, may we have some more” when it comes to massive energy taxes that will do to our economy what a German U-boat did to the Lusitania.

Judge Sotomayor clearly doesn’t have a whole lot of that “common touch” or “practical sense.”  Indeed, writing for the majority decision that overturned Sotomayor’s ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia:

noted that forcing compliance under Sotomayor’s reasoning would make companies spend nine times the amount necessary to accomplish “nearly the same benefit to the environment that cheaper technologies would achieve.”

Spend nine times more for very nearly the same benefit.  And liberals wonder why conservatives call them “insane.”

Now, it just so happens that “common touch” and “practical sense” didn’t matter very much when we voted for our president, either.  So why should it matter to us when we put yet another black-robed master over us for the rest of her life?

Let’s hear what Obama said he wanted:

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The guy we voted for as our president said he planned to bankrupt fully half of our source of electricity.

“Empathy” means millions of Americans freezing to death in the dark.

Get ready for it.  Because Obama’s and Sotomayor’s crap river is going to flood right down your family’s throat.

Tags: analysis, bankrupt, billions, cost-benefit, electicity rates, empathy, environmentalists, EPA, firefighters, green groups, necessarily skyrocket, Obama, power plants, Riverkeeper, Sotomayor