WASHINGTON A great gust of common sense has blown away the rhetoric that obscures the president's soft-on-polluters policy with slogans such as "Clear Skies." The Supreme Court decision demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency take steps to regulate emissions linked to global warming is a victory for Mother Earth. And much, much more.

The substance of the case was simple: The administration, in its ideological war against regulation in general and its refusal to acknowledge scientific evidence of global warming in particular, subverted the Clean Air Act by having EPA abandon its mandate to treat certain auto emissions as air pollutants. When Congress required EPA to use its judgment in assessing the danger of air pollutants, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court's 5-4 majority, the judgment had to be applied based on facts about the public's health and welfare. The agency's decisions, the court said, were to be made "within defined statutory limits."

"Put another way," he wrote, "the use of the word 'judgment' is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text." There is nothing new about such roving adventures. In the past six years, Bush has asserted his right to exercise grossly excessive powers, including imprisoning American citizens indefinitely and without charge; using abusive interrogation techniques barred by U.S. and international laws; eavesdropping on Americans' phone calls without a warrant. Bush has issued hundreds of "signing statements" in which he approves legislation overall but singles out provisions he won't obey.

According to research published by The Boston Globe last year, Bush has decreed that he won't follow certain affirmative action rules, he can order the Justice Department to withhold information from Congress and he can tell a scientist not to give Congress results of government-funded research. He has declared that only he can decide whether certain government and contracting whistleblowers can provide information to Congress - despite a congressional mandate that they come forward without fear of being fired.

Aziz Z. Huq, co-author with Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. of "Unchecked and Unbalanced," says the White House even has ignored a 2002 law that requires it to disclose when it has refused to follow a statute because Bush considered it unconstitutional. "With very few exceptions, it's the job of the executive branch to take care that the laws are followed," Huq says. "In a wide variety of areas, what you've seen is a resistance to doing that."

With respect to Bush's policy of detaining accused terrorists without charge or trial, the Supreme Court already has rebuked him twice. Yet after its EPA ruling, Bush pointedly failed to say he would order the environmental agency to get moving. Instead, he rehashed an argument for inaction, saying there must be international progress on climate change first. The court had just explicitly rejected this assertion. Bush's "broad authority" in foreign affairs, Stevens wrote, "does not extend to the refusal to execute domestic laws."

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