Michael Hiltzik: Trump Cabinet sabotages its own policies through laziness, incompetence or both
Buried within a recent judicial ruling overturning the Trump administration's approval of the largely pointless Cadiz water project are a few clues to why Trump's policymaking is so often blocked in federal court.
The operative term is "arbitrary and capricious." Its appearance in a judge's opinion in a Trump-related case signals that an administration effort to overturn an Obama-era rule or policy is too lazy, incompetent or slapdash to stand.
That's the foundation of the June 21 ruling by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu of Los Angeles. Wu found that the Interior Department hadn't done the necessary groundwork to reverse the Obama administration's rejection of a project that would arguably damage the ecology of the Mojave Desert - or at least that the agency had made its decision first and conjured up a rationale later.
Wu wrote that in its legal analysis supporting its reversal, the Trump administration "seemingly cherry-picks portions of different sources to craft a case for a directed/desired result."
