Fight against green dishwashers is latest to evoke fury over judge-shopping

Far-right judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is fresh from being overturned at the Supreme Court for trying to bring down the Food and Drug Administration’s process for approving drugs. Now, he’s looking at regulations on energy-efficient dishwashers and washing machines.

Reuters reported Friday that a conservative group in Texas is suing the Department of Energy for its standards involving the appliances, saying that President Joe Biden’s “administration lacked authority to adopt the regulations.”

The lawsuit alleges that the federal government doesn’t have the right to mandate a standard for what the phrase “energy efficiency” means.

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The case was referred to Kacsmaryk, who is the only federal judge sitting in Amarillo.

Kascmaryk is at the center of a judge-shopping scandal after allegations that right-wing groups file lawsuits in his jurisdiction because they expect he’ll be sympathetic.

Commenting on the matter, The Nation’s legal analyst, Elie Mystal remarked, “Now we’ll get treated to the Emperor of Amarillo’s theories on home economics.” He included a frowning face with the message on X.

Two consumers represented by the Washington, D.C. group the Competitive Enterprise Institute claim that “the statutes the Energy Department relied upon to justify the new rules did not actually give it authority to adopt water efficiency standards for appliances other than showerheads, faucets, water closets or urinals.”

The group brags on its website that it “has been instrumental in fighting decades of climate alarmism.”

“Coalitions led by CEI were instrumental in defeating ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, defeating enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, and convincing President Trump to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate treaty,” the site boasts.

The general counsel of the organization, Dan Greenberg, claims, “The Energy Department’s regulations are counterproductive and anti-consumer, and they appear to be lawless, as well.”

A ruling in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals by a Donald Trump-appointed judge decided in January that “earlier dishwasher rule from the department was arbitrary and capricious.”

The Department of Energy has “zero power to regulate water use by any product,” ruled U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham.

The matter has been a pet project of Trump, who has complained about low-flow toilets that require him to flush “ten times – fifteen times!”

The matter was so serious to him he filmed a White House video talking about it during the pandemic in the summer of 2020.