How did this get to the Supreme Court?

The contention was that Naval sonar operations off the California coast just might, possibly, do some imagined harm to mammals….though it had not yet….and therefore the Navy should shut it down. Never mind what that would do to the security of the Pacific Fleet.

This has come before the United States Supreme Court. And gives pause:

Before the election, the media were full of warnings about the scary things that conservative justices and judges appointed by Republican John McCain might do. Barack Obama and his advisers should now reflect on scary things that the judges demanded by his liberal base might do.

That snip is more than halfway down the piece, but seems strikingly clear as the takeaway message, or one of them.

Here’s the scenario…

How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?

That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.

And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.

Fortunately, as the piece notes, the justices overturned the restrictions on sonar training in this wacky case.

The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, “the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors” far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.

“For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. “In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”

Noting that “antisubmarine warfare is currently the Pacific Fleet’s top war-fighting priority,” Roberts explained in detail why the training exercises are essential for effective use by Navy strike groups of “mid-frequency active sonar.”

Think this is unnecessary?

It may seem far-fetched to worry that enemy submarines might someday sink an aircraft carrier with 5,000 sailors and marines aboard. But no more far-fetched than it would have seemed on September 10, 2001, to worry that terrorists might murder in a single day more Americans than died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

What is a real reach here is the argument over imagined harm to mammals and the precedence that fear should take over national defense.

Roberts found it unnecessary to decide whether the Navy violated NEPA because even if it did, the proper judicial remedy would not have been to restrict the service’s training. He invoked well-settled limits on judicial power to issue injunctions by balancing the plaintiffs’ interest in observing marine mammals against the Navy’s, and the public’s, interest in adequate antisubmarine training. This “does not strike us as a close question,” the chief justice concluded.