Ultimately, he agreed that “because the Administrator has not taken any action to enforce the Clean Air Act here, these cases do not support the United States position.”
Trump seemed particularly upset that SpaceXAI could face large fines. He argued that “punishing illegal conduct through civil penalties payable to the Treasury on behalf of the United States is ‘executive power par excellence.’” As Trump explained, because the CAA is too vague on this point, “the constitutional avoidance canon” applies, and the courts must err on the side of his administration. Simply dismissing the lawsuit would avoid a constitutional clash, Trump argued.
But once again Brown disagreed.
The United States “fails to identify any ambiguity in the text of the statute to which the Court could and should apply the constitutional avoidance canon,” Brown wrote. Rejecting Trump’s constitutional “doubts,” he concluded that “constitutional circumvention does not allow the Court to invent a right that does not exist in the statute.”
“The fact that the citizen lawsuit provision of the Clean Air Act allows private parties to enforce the Clean Air Act through civil litigation therefore does not make citizen lawsuits an impermissible exercise of the President’s executive power,” Brown wrote. And “it does not follow that all lawsuits seeking civil sanctions require the exercise of non-delegable executive power.”
Had Trump been successful, Americans who increasingly oppose data centers across the country could have been largely barred from seeking fines when contamination can be proven.
Brown said the CAA cannot be interpreted that way, however, since “it can hardly be doubted that, for a plaintiff who is injured or faces the threat of future harm due to ongoing unlawful conduct at the time of suit, a sanction that effectively reduces that conduct and prevents its recurrence provides a form of relief. Civil sanctions may fit that description.” Crucially, “to the extent that they encourage defendants to discontinue current violations and deter them from committing future ones, they provide relief to citizen plaintiffs who are injured or threatened with injury as a result of ongoing unlawful conduct,” Brown wrote.
