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Quoting ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ judge strikes down Trump administration rollback of historic law protecting birds - The Washington Post
Aug 12, 2020 1 min, 33 secs
A federal judge in New York has invalidated rule changes by the Trump administration that allowed individuals and corporations to kill scores of birds as long as they could prove they did not intentionally set out to do so.

Caproni ripped the administration’s interpretation of “takings” and “killings” of birds under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act as applying only if the animals are specifically targeted.

The changes made by the Trump administration largely benefited oil companies, which have paid most of the fines for violating the act, according to an analysis by the National Audubon Society.

In striking down the rule change, she admonished the Interior Department with a passage from “To Kill a Mockingbird.”.

“This is a huge victory for birds and it comes at a critical time — science tells us that we’ve lost 3 billion birds in less than a human lifetime and that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction due to climate change,” Sarah Greenberger, interim chief conservation officer for the National Audubon Society, said in a statement.

In the weeks leading up to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act rule change in 2018, the administration lost three court cases in three consecutive days.

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act was enacted after several species of common birds became extinct.

In striking down the Interior Department’s rule change, Caproni deferred to how Congress framed the law.

Attorneys for the Interior Department sought to delay the court’s remedy for undermining the will of Congress when it enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and amended it throughout the years.

“The court’s decision is a ringing victory for conservationists who have fought to sustain the historical interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to protect migratory birds from industrial harms,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, the president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement

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