This is a federal judge, can she rule on state charges?

Isn't there more to it than that because these are federal agents? Asking.

I think they meant civil versus criminal rather than nice vs mean.

This happens all the time even on the federal level. My company just ate a several thousand $ fine because we were working on a site where the plumbers didn't mark an open pit while plumbing a mop sink. We were the HVAC contractors working on the roof. We were not even working in the same area and had no way of knowing what the plumbers were doing. OSHA didn't care. Every company who was working the job got hit with a fine for continuing work on an unsafe site. It's complete bullshit but, at the same time, everyone onsite is going to think twice about ever working with those plumbers again. So even though it's complete and utter shit, it is probably the most effective tool at their disposal with current laws.

The people we're talking about have billions and we can only legally charge them a few thousand. We can't cut off the money spigot, so we cut off the supply of workers willing to work for them.

And the workers that get fined are the ones still performing the work after we've issued a verbal and written stop-work order and cited the owners. And it's not like we just put something in the mail - we discover the work by driving by, seeing the workers on site, and speaking with them directly and telling them to stop. Our code enforcement people don't cite the individual workers until their third trip to the site in which they're told to stop. Hell - if they stopped when we first asked we wouldn't even know who to cite if we wanted.

Most of the time, they stop without being cited and work with us on permitting and remediation. We end up having to go after the contractors for violation of a SWO about 1% of the time (though we'll also cite them for other things like wrenching through public utilities in the ROW more often). And in those cases it's almost always the contractors who lie and either tell the owners a permit isn't needed or that they already have one. The last time we did it they had actually printed out a forged permit placard.

And that 1% that repeatedly refuses to follow the rules gets to go to court and explain their side to the judge, where the reality is they'll probably have the daily fine dismissed and only pay the initial $500 or whatever if they start to cooperate.

You can tell the trully advanced countries from the backwards ones by them having fines which are proportional to income/wealth rather than fixed.

The only ones I know which are the former are in Scandinavia.

The UK theoretically also has that for Court fines (it's in the conviction guidance, which means it's optional), but in practice not really.

You think a municipality can issue proportional fines just because it wants to? They don't write the laws.

When you can't take out the head, you sweep the legs.

We can't get Trump or his minions in Washington right now. But if we go after ICE and DHS people with massive civil fines, he'll run out of people willing to do his bidding.

It’s what plants crave