Legal Insurrection reports that 21 states are suing to block Joe Biden’s executive order that halted the Keystone XL pipeline.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 19 other state attorneys general filed suit today in United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas to block President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional and illegitimate attempt to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXLP).
Despite several exhaustive studies undertaken by the Obama State Department that concluded the Keystone XL pipeline would boost the U.S economy, create American jobs, and safely transport oil throughout the country without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, Biden revoked the permit via executive order mere hours after reciting his oath of office. However, he did not have the power to do so.
The substance of the lawsuit is straightforward. Congress, not the president, regulates interstate commerce. Biden violated that when he unilaterally blocked the construction of the pipeline. As has been Biden’s MO since the inauguration, he failed to even consult Congress or any of the states affected by the decision. He has done the same with regard to the border, and is now facing a massive crisis of his own making there.
The science does not back Biden on this decision. Pipelines have proven to be the safest and cleanest means of moving oil and natural gas from where they’re produced to where they’re refined and used. The United States has about 3 million miles of pipelines under our feet. Those pipelines deliver energy every day without incident the vast majority of the time. They also keep trucks and trains off the roads and rails that would be delivering the oil and gas, keeping some emissions from ever getting into the air.
Canceling the pipeline isn’t about the project’s safety or the science of energy delivery. It’s about attacking the U.S. energy industry.
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The states launching the lawsuit say Biden’s unilateral cancelation of the Keystone has killed 42,000 jobs. Unions opposed the decision, but Biden did not consult them either.
In the LI post, William Jacobson makes a very good point.
If the roles were reversed, Democrat activist groups would have been in court the next day all across the country hoping some judge somewhere would agree with them and issue an injunction. That’s what happened in the travel cases, so many cases were filed in so many different district courts that opponents only needed to win once. It didn’t matter if Trump won most of them, even a single nationwide injunction stalled things for weeks or months until it got to the Supreme Court, where eventually Trump won.
He’s urging Republicans to be quicker about filing suit to block Biden’s unilateral executive orders. He’s right. In the Keystone case, Biden issued the executive order on his first day. It’s taken nearly three months to get the lawsuit going. Since that time, construction has shut down and John Kerry arrogantly told displaced pipeline workers to go get jobs building solar panels.
They would have to move to China to obtain such jobs, as the vast majority of the world’s solar panels are built there, not the United States.
Congressional Republicans are limited in what they can do to block Biden’s executive orders. That’s one of the reasons he issues them instead of consulting with Congress as the Constitution intends. The states will have to do the heavy lifting, and they will have to be quicker about doing so than they have been thus far.
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