As Planet Gore readers know well, the Left has been busy using the courts to assert control over an ever-broader array of public policy — including national security – by claiming dubious environmental concerns that would allow them to force certain practices and forbid others.

The Wall Street Journal discusses the Supreme Court’s welcome rebuff of NRDC v. Winter in today’s “The Greens Get Harpooned“:

The Supreme Court opened its fall term auspiciously yesterday by sinking the environmental Pequod known as NRDC v. Winter. Nonetheless, the question the Justices were forced to resolve — do whales trump national security? — shows how relentlessly the courts are colonizing the war powers of the executive branch.
The case concerned Naval training exercises off the coast of Southern California that have been conducted for some four decades. The Natural Resources Defense Council and other green litigants sued to stop the use of midfrequency active sonar, which they say hurts or confuses whales, dolphins and the like. The Navy had already adopted dozens of measures to minimize any impact on the life aquatic, and no one could point to a single documented instance of sonar-related injury to any marine mammal. But the NRDC claimed the paperwork wasn’t in order under certain federal statutes.
Federal Judge Florence Cooper in Los Angeles first tried to ban the exercises, then joined with the wacky Ninth Circuit Appeals Court in San Francisco to limit sonar use in some cases and shut it down in others. Navy Secretary Donald Winter determined that the new restrictions made it impossible to prepare sailors for “mission-critical” antisubmarine warfare, and President Bush issued an emergency order allowing the training to proceed for the sake of national security.
If the bureaucratic distinction between an “environmental impact statement” and an “environmental assessment” sounds like a flimsy excuse for second-guessing the judgment of admirals in wartime — well, this case was never really about the welfare of Baby Humpback. Instead, green activists and liberal judges were looking to assert their dominance in matters of war and peace.
At least for the Court’s narrow majority, their claims were not even “a close question.” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet” and that the California courts had committed “an abuse of discretion.”

Read the rest here.