Trump talks up his rule-cutting, but courts saying otherwise

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is positioning himself as a champion regulation-cutter in the leadup to the Nov. 3 election, but in between his showy red-tape-cutting events, his deregulatory agenda is taking a beating in the courts.

One day, he’s hailing a massive rollback to one of the nation’s most important environmental laws, which he hopes will speed up gas pipelines and all kinds of other big projects. Another, he’s holding forth between two pickup trucks being used as props on the South Lawn of the White House — a blue one piled with weights identified as government regulations and a red one, of course, that has been unburdened.

“No other administration has done anywhere near,” Trump declared.

But there’s a sharp disconnect between the president's muscular rhetoric and the many courtroom battles he's lost.

Trump's deregulatory victories have been shrinking in number as courts uphold many of the lawsuits filed by states, environmental groups and others in response to his administration's sometimes hastily engineered rollbacks.

Just hours before Trump's South Lawn event, for example, a federal judge reinstated an Obama-era rule that required oil and gas companies operating on public lands to take reasonable measures to stop climate-damaging methane emissions.

The judge described the Trump administration’s legal groundwork to justify the rollback as “wholly inadequate” and “backwards." “An agency cannot flip-flop regulations on the whims of each new administration,″ she wrote.

The defeat was the administration's third major loss in federal courts in just one week.

“Those were three really huge major decisions all across the span ... where the Trump administration was rebuked across the board," said Vickie Patton, general...