Because, as an appellate court, the Supreme Court does not view evidence. It reviews evidence submitted to lower courts, and legal arguments, and the law itself, and makes decisions on that basis and that basis alone.

That’s the way the court system works. Appellate courts do not view evidence. They review it. The court of original jurisdiction — the court from which decisions are appealed to the Circuit Courts of Appeals, and then the Supreme Court — is the trier of fact, and it alone makes decisions based on evidence.

In this case, the law mandated the decision they reached, regardless of the evidence. Administrative agencies have a process that they must follow in order to adopt new rules, and their powers are limited and circumscribed. If they do not follow those laws, then their decisions are subject to getting thrown out. That is what happened here.

If adopting those rules was so critical — a proposition with which I soundly disagree, but even if I agreed with it, I’d still take this poisition — then it’s incumbent on the EPA to dot every i and cross every t in adopting them. They didn’t.

The United States is a government of laws, not people. That’s something that folks from other counteries — and, too often, leftists here — forget. I can assure you, however, that the courts do not.