Grist has a comprehensive piece on President Bush's attempt to reappoint seven conservative judicial candidates filibustered by the Senate last year, among them William G. Myers III:

Unlike most judicial nominees, Myers has never been a judge. Instead, his qualifications include decades as a paid lobbyist and lawyer to the coal and cattle industries. In his recent position as the Bush Interior Department's chief attorney, Myers tried to give away valuable federal lands to a mining company and imperiled Native American sacred sites. "His nomination is the epitome of the anti-environmental tilt of so many of President Bush's nominees," says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

Myers would be up for a position on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over 75% of all federal lands. But this is about more than trees and spotted owls.

The United States Constitution gives Congress power to make law, but not just any law -- Congress has to find justification for any law they wish to pass in the Constitution. Unfortunately our founding fathers neglected to include an article about spotted owls. Thus it has come to be that almost all environmental law rests on the commerce clause, which gives Congress ability "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

If that sounds confusing and even tenuous, that's because it is:

Some Bush nominees [...] say Congress has no authority to enact such measures. William G. Myers, for example, has argued in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court that federal clean-water and endangered-species safeguards are unconstitutional. The Cato Institute's Roger Pilon agrees: "The Endangered Species Act is utterly unconstitutional," and so are the Clean Air and Water acts "for the most part," he asserts. "The commerce power was written to ensure the free flow of commerce among the states," period.