SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
"Courts across the country keep rejecting Big Oil's attempts to escape justice for their climate deception," said one advocate.
Advocates celebrated Monday after a Boulder, Colorado judge rejected attempts by ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy subsidiaries to dismiss a landmark lawsuit that seeks damages for the harms the fossil fuel companies have inflicted on the climate and local communities.
The lawsuit, brought in 2018 by the city and county of Boulder, argues that mounting climate costs "should be shared by the Suncor and Exxon defendants because they knowingly and substantially contributed to the climate crisis by producing, promoting, and selling a substantial portion of the fossil fuels that are causing and exacerbating climate change, while concealing and misrepresenting the dangers associated with their intended use."
Colorado Public Radio noted Monday that the lawsuit "cites the 2010 Fourmile Canyon fire and 2013 floods as examples of climate disasters in Boulder County."
"The case was filed before the Marshall fire swept through the area in the winter of 2021, incinerating more than 1,000 homes and causing more than $2 billion in damage in what is now considered the most destructive wildfire in state history," the outlet observed.
The legal challenge seeks relief under a Colorado consumer protection law and other local statutes, accusing the corporations of public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy.
In an 81-page decision, Boulder County District Court Judge Robert Gunning rejected the Exxon and Suncor subsidiaries' claim that the state court lacked jurisdiction and concluded that "the public nuisance, private nuisance, trespass, conspiracy, and unjust enrichment claims may proceed against ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy, and Suncor Sales."
Ashley Stolzmann, Boulder County's commissioner, said Monday that the decision "reaffirms our stance: We are suffering from the impacts and heavy costs of the climate crisis, right here, right now."
"Today, we take a meaningful step towards accountability and ensuring our voices and hardships are acknowledged," Stolzmann added.
"The people of Boulder are now one crucial step closer to having their day in court to hold Exxon and Suncor accountable for their climate lies and the massive damages they've caused."
Monday's ruling represents the latest blow Exxon and Suncor have suffered during the yearslong legal battle. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the companies' attempt to move the case to federal court.
"Since the beginning, defendants have been arguing against a case we did not plead," said Sean Powers, a senior attorney with EarthRights International, which is representing the plaintiffs.
"Plaintiffs are not trying to litigate a solution to the climate crisis, they are seeking redress for harms they have suffered and will continue to suffer," Powers continued. "The only conduct at issue is defendants' own: what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did with that knowledge."
Boulder is among the dozens of local governments that have sued oil and gas companies in recent years, aiming to hold the industry accountable for severely damaging the climate and deceiving the public about the dangers of its extractive business model.
Exxon has known for decades about the link between burning fossil fuels and planetary warming and has worked to cast doubt on the science as it continues to drill in the face of worsening climate extremes across the globe.
"The people of Boulder are now one crucial step closer to having their day in court to hold Exxon and Suncor accountable for their climate lies and the massive damages they've caused," Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said Monday. "Courts across the country keep rejecting Big Oil's attempts to escape justice for their climate deception, and sooner or later these companies will have to explain the evidence of their misconduct to a jury."
Twelve years into states’ marijuana legalization experiment, public support for making marijuana legal nationwide has never been higher.
It’s been over a decade since Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize marijuana for adults. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s fair to ask: Has this policy been successful?
Absolutely. A policy of legalization, regulation, and education is preferable to a policy of criminalization, stigmatization, and incarceration.
Let’s be clear. Legalization didn’t create or normalize the marijuana market in the United States. The market was already here.
But under a policy of prohibition, this market flourished underground—and those involved in it remained largely unaccountable. They didn’t pay taxes, they didn’t check IDs, and they didn’t test the purity of their products. Disputes that arose in the illicit marketplace were not adjudicated in courts of law.
These policies are working largely as voters and politicians intended—and because they’re preferable to cannabis criminalization.
By contrast, under regulation, cannabis products in many states are now available from licensed manufacturers at retail stores.
Cannabis is cultivated, and products are manufactured, in accordance with good manufacturing practices. Products are lab tested and labeled accordingly. And sales are taxed, with revenues being reinvested in the community. Since 2014, retail sales of adult-use cannabis products have generated more than $15 billion in tax revenue.
Most importantly, millions of Americans—many of them young adults—are no longer being arrested for possessing a substance that is objectively safer than either tobacco or alcohol.
According to data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the annual number of marijuana-related arrests in the United States fell from 750,000 in 2012 to 227,000 in 2022, the last year for which data is available.
In short, these state-level policy changes have resulted in countless Americans being spared criminal records—and the lost opportunities that accompany them—in the past decade.
And contrary to opponents’ fears, cannabis use by teens has not risen in parallel with legalization.
According to data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of high schoolers who use marijuana actually fell 30% over the past decade. Compliance check data from California, Colorado, Nevada, and other legal marijuana states show that licensed marijuana retailers do not sell products to underage patrons.
Also contrary to some critics’ claims, legalization states have not experienced any spike in either psychosis or mental illnesses.
According to findings published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, rates of psychosis-related health care claims are no higher in jurisdictions where cannabis is legal than in those where it’s not. Stanford University researchers similarly reported last year that residents of states where cannabis is legal exhibit no higher levels of psychosis than those in non-legal states.
Legalization is also successfully disrupting the illicit marketplace. According to a 2023 survey, 52% of consumers residing in legal states said that they primarily sourced their cannabis products from brick-and-mortar establishments. By contrast, only 6% of respondents said that they primarily purchased cannabis from a “dealer.”
Many consumers in non-legal states also reported that they frequently traveled to neighboring legal states to purchase cannabis products rather than buying from illicit dealers in their own state.
Twelve years into states’ marijuana legalization experiment, public support for making marijuana legal nationwide has never been higher. To date, 24 states have legalized the adult-use market.
None of these states have ever repealed their legalization laws. That’s because these policies are working largely as voters and politicians intended—and because they’re preferable to cannabis criminalization.
After a century of failed policies and “canna-bigotry,” the verdict is in. Legalization is a success, and the end of cannabis prohibition can’t come soon enough.
The 9-0 ruling by the Court has empowered MAGA Republicans to continue the lie that their assaults on democracy are done in the name of “election integrity” when we know full well the opposite is true.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have . . . So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” –President Donald Trump, speaking by phone to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday, January 2, 2021.
“I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be President of the United States.” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan to attorney Jason Murray on Thursday, February 8, 2024.
The Supreme Court has now done what pretty much every commentator expected it to do, overturning the Colorado state Supreme Court, and ruling that Donald Trump cannot lawfully be removed by state officials from the ballot of Colorado or any other state.
The ruling, decided by a 9-0 vote, was unanimous. The core rationale for the decision was simple: the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to codify principles of national citizenship over and above “state’s rights” claims advanced by the defeated Confederacy, and to leave it to individual states to enforce the Amendment’s Section III would undermine the very idea of national citizenship.
While I am no expert in constitutional law, there are failures of reasoning in the decision that are apparent even to me...
As the decision states, such a confusing “patchwork,” would “sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National government and the people of the United States as a whole” (p. 12). Separate concurring opinions, by Amy Comey Barrett and by Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, took issue with the ruling decision’s claim that according to Section 5 of the Amendment, only an act of Congress could enforce Section 3 by removing one or more individuals from a ballot. But all nine Justices agreed that, however Section III might theoretically be enforced, it was neither “self-enforcing” in general nor enforceable by individual state decisions. And so Trump must be on the ballot.
As with all SCOTUS decisions, we can expect many experts in constitutional law and U.S. history to take issue with the reasoning behind this case. At the very least, it must be noted that a substantial number of amicus curiae briefs were submitted in support of Trump’s removal, including briefs from major conservative experts, such as retired U.S. Judge J. Michael Luttig, one of many conservatives who actually spearheaded the effort to disqualify Trump from seeking office. The SCOTUS decision apparently thought little of the many powerful arguments advanced in these briefs.
While I am no expert in constitutional law, there are failures of reasoning in the decision that are apparent even to me (if the Amendment is considered to be so scrupulous about disqualification, why does Section 3 explicitly outline the provisions for removing the disability without being equally explicit about the provisions for instating it?). But there surely are “arguments” on either side of this matter, and it was obvious that this Court would never rule against Trump’s “right” to be on the ballot. The real question, always, was how it would explain its decision, and how much dissent the decision would engender. And for me, the most disappointing aspect of the decision was not that a strong conservative majority would support Trump, but that the three liberal Justices would not simply concur, but would squander the opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of Trump’s appeal and, even more important, the underlying frailties of the constitutional system that continue to empower Trump’s assaults on liberal democracy.
That this opportunity would be squandered was clear as soon as Elena Kagan spoke the words in oral argument that are quoted at the very top, words that might well have been spoken for all nine members of the Court, for they are at the heart of the unanimous decision.
Why should a single state decide?
This is an excellent question. But Kagan failed to seriously consider it, by failing to ask a number of essential follow-up questions of the Trump legal team, and then to incorporate these matters into a strong opinion, whether in concurrence or dissent, that called out Trumpism for its attempts to prey on Constitutional weaknesses.
Question 1: Why did Donald Trump work so hard, from November 3, 2020 until January 6, 2021, to pressure one guy—the Secretary of State of a single state, Georgia–to “find” a few thousand votes, in order to claim victory in an election that he lost by seven million popular votes? And why did he exert similar pressure on state officials in a few other “swing states”—Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—in the hope of claiming victory by winning the winner-take-all elections in those individual states?
Question 1a: After so relentlessly attempting to change the outcome in a few states, is it not the height of hypocrisy and cynicism for Donald Trump to now argue that no single state, or handful of states, should by right determine a presidential election—especially since this very scenario played out in both George W. Bush’s 2000 victory and Trump’s 2016 victory, both of which hinged on narrow vote margins in a few states and not on winning the national popular vote? Only now this is a problem? Really?
Question 1b: Beyond hypocrisy, back in October 2020, Barton Gellman published a brilliantly prescient piece in The Atlantic entitled “The Election That Could Break America.” This is what he warned:
Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.
. . . The worst case . . . is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power.
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand . . . “
Is this not exactly what happened, as documented extensively by the House January 6 Committee, and as determined by the factual ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court? And does this not demonstrate that Trump was intent on exploiting precisely the absence of a national popular vote? And doesn’t this deserve attention at every available opportunity?
Question 2: It is claimed that if a state such as Colorado, or Maine, were to remove Donald Trump from their ballot on Section 3 grounds, this would create a confusing “patchwork,” and would “sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National government and the people of the United States as a whole.” But is not our entire constitutional system a confusing patchwork that severs the direct link between the citizens of the United States and the national government of the United States?
Is this not the very function of the United States Senate, in which Wyoming’s 581,000 citizens have the same national representation as California’s 39 million citizens?
Is not our entire constitutional system a confusing patchwork that severs the direct link between the citizens of the United States and the national government of the United States?
Is this not the very function of the Electoral College itself, which very deliberately elevates the importance of a small group of electors selected in each of the 50 states, and explicitly rejects the principle that a national popular vote should determine who is the President of the United States?
Is this not the very system of election administration established by Article I of the U.S. Constitution, whose Section 4 clearly states: “the times, places, and manner of holding elections, for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of chusing Senators?”
Question 3: If both the principle of national citizenship, and “the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National government and the people of the United States as a whole,” are so important, then why has the Republican Party for decades pursued a deliberate policy of using its control of statehouses to limit the voting rights of large numbers of citizens, by purging rolls, instating challenging voter identification requirements, limiting early or Sunday voting, and using local control of election administration to limit the number of polling places and their hours of operation?
And when the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in 2021 decisively passed two major pieces of national legislation designed to further nationalize aspects of election administration and voting rights enforcement in order to codify the principle of citizen equality—H.R.1, the For the People Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—why did Republicans work feverishly to demonize, oppose, and obstruct the passage of the legislation, stalling both bills in the Senate and effectively killing them? Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell went so far as to denounce such legislation on the Senate Floor as “Democrat power-grabbing,” insisting that voting rights enforcement “is not a federal issue” and ought to be left to the states?
Why should states decide how to establish and administer the electoral rules that govern all elections in their state, including federal elections?
Because the Constitution prescribes this, and Republicans have opposed any legislative effort to change it.
What will become of national citizenship if a “patchwork” of state and local rules mediates, limits, and severs the link between American citizens and the U.S. government?
A very good question indeed. But its answer is staring us in the face: democratic citizenship will be eviscerated, and the enemies of constitutional democracy will seize the opportunity to claim electoral victories they did not win, and if successful pursue further means of weaking constitutional democracy.
Here’s another question: what would have happened if the three liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, whatever they thought about the wisdom of the Colorado decision, had taken the full measure of the hypocrisy behind all of those Republicans—on the Trump legal team, in the Congress, and on the Court itself—who have long upheld the “patchwork” system of anti-majoritarian processes that adulterate and diminish meaningful democratic decision-making, but who have now decided, when it suits them, to shed crocodile tears for the integrity of “the American people as a whole” and the right of “the voters” to decide elections?
We will never know.
It is sometimes argued that a great virtue of the Supreme Court’s judicial review is that the process of delivering opinions–including concurrent and dissenting opinions–promotes and elevates democratic deliberation, by making plain for the broad democratic citizenry the crucial opinions in play in important public controversies.
This might sometimes be true. But it was not true this week.
For this week the Supreme Court chose unanimously, via the logic supplied by Elena Kagan, to both promote a fiction about the Constitution and, in so doing, to empower MAGA Republicans to continue the lie that their assaults on democracy are done in the name of “election integrity” and the return of democratic sovereignty to “the people.”