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ted cruz
Climate Defenders Warn GOP Immunity Bill Puts 'Big Oil Above the Law'
“Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country," said one campaigner.
Apr 17, 2026
Green groups warned Friday that Big Oil-backed Republican legislation would give fossil fuel companies immunity from laws or lawsuits aimed at holding them accountable for their role in causing the climate emergency.
On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Budd (R-NC), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) that, if passed, would "prohibit liability against those engaged in the mining, extraction, production, refinement, transportation, distribution, marketing, manufacture, or sale of energy for damages or injunctive or other relief from the use of their products, and for other purposes."
Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) on Friday introduced the House version of the legislation, dubbed the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, "to protect American energy from leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity," as her office put it.
🚨After months of fossil fuel industry lobbying, Republican lawmakers have introduced federal legislation that would give oil and gas companies immunity from any laws or lawsuits that aim to hold them accountable for their role in the climate crisis. Time to get loud: 📣 NO IMMUNITY FOR BIG OIL 📣
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— Center for Climate Integrity (@climateintegrity.org) April 17, 2026 at 12:30 PM
If passed, the legislation would ban retroactive climate liability lawsuits, dismiss any such litigation pending upon the law's enactment, void all state energy penalty laws, and affirm that the federal government maintains exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and other interstate environmental standards.
Other Republican-controlled states including Tennesseee and Utah have recently passed such legislation, and others—including Iowa, Louisiana, and Oklahoma—have introduced similar bills.
“This blatant championing of some of the world’s largest polluters shows how far certain elected officials will go to undermine democratic policymaking and deny people and communities access to justice," Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Friday.
"No company should be above the law, especially those that planned, funded, and continue to engage in a coordinated decadeslong campaign to protect their profits by deceiving the public and blocking climate action," Mulvey continued.
"Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country," she added. "Congress must not capitulate to wealthy special interests. Communities deserve the right to hold polluters accountable for the deadly and costly harms they are causing.”
Former Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that “every elected official who cares about the interests of their constituents more than those of corporate polluters should oppose this disgraceful proposal."
"Juries are a fundamental bastion of democracy, and it’s beyond dangerous to allow powerful and wealthy corporations to shield themselves from ever having to face jurors’ judgment," he added.
The Center for Climate Integrity said the bill "would put Big Oil above the law."
“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made," Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles said Friday. "If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?”
While these and other climate advocates denounced the bill, their congressional sponsors—and those lawmakers' fossil fuel industry campaign donors—applauded its introduction.
“Energy security is national security, and we will not self-sabotage our critical industries with a cascade of costly lawsuits and extreme penalties that jeopardize American drilling,” Hageman said in a statement. “America’s energy producers should be protected from the dangerous legal precedent that would be set by the retroactive punishment of lawful activity.”
American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers president and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Mike Sommers said in a joint statement, "We thank Sen. Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers.”
“These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive," the lobbyists added. "Congress should act decisively to reaffirm federal authority over national energy policy and end this activist-driven state overreach.”
Eleven states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—along with the District of Columbia and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments have ongoing lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for lying to the public about their products’ role in causing and worsening climate change.
On Friday, the right-wing US Supreme Court unanimously issued an important procedural ruling that certain environmental damage lawsuits—in this case, one challenging Chevron's destruction of coastal wetlands in Louisiana—can be moved from state to generally friendlier federal courts. This, after a jury in Plaquemines Parish ordered Chevron and two other companies to pay $744 million in damages for harming coastal wetlands, a verdict that was appealed.
The US Supreme Court's decision came as its justices prepare to hear Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case in which the plaintiffs—three Suncor entities and ExxonMobil—are seeking to relocate a climate damages lawsuit from Colorado to federal court.
Big Oil-backed efforts to relocate cases to friendlier forums come amid wins for climate defenders, most notably Held v. Montana, a historic 2024 state court ruling in favor of youth-led plaintiffs based on the Montana Constitution's right to "a clean and healthful environment."
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‘These Guys Can’t Help Themselves’: Cruz Pushes $200 Billion Capital Gains Tax Cut Without OK From Congress
Republican senators said they were seeking to end an "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans." But nearly all the benefits of their proposal would go to the wealthiest 1%.
Mar 03, 2026
Two leading Republicans are pushing for the Trump administration to issue another $200 billion tax cut, primarily to the wealthiest Americans, without congressional approval.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-SC) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging him to use executive authority to lower the federal tax on capital gains—the profits from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, and other investments.
The senators have proposed that capital gains taxes should be “indexed for inflation." As the Post explained:
The plan pushed by Cruz and Scott has been sought by conservatives for many years. Under current law, an investor who bought $100 worth of stock in 1990 and sold it today for $300 would currently owe capital gains taxes on the full $200 in profit. But the $100 investment in 1990 would be worth roughly $230 in today’s dollars after accounting for inflation. Under the Cruz-Scott proposal, the investor would only owe taxes on that $70, rather than the full $200.
The senators called on Bessent to "eliminate" this "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans."
According to Federal Reserve data from 2025, the richest 1% of Americans owned about half of all stocks, while the poorest 50% owned only 1%.
Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which enacted massive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last summer, is already estimated to funnel more than $1 trillion to the top 1% of earners over the next 10 years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
It is unclear whether Bessent would even have the power to change how gains are taxed without an act of Congress, or if Bessent has any interest in doing so. But the vast majority of the benefits from Cruz and Scott's proposal, if enacted, would likely go to the rich as well.
When the Trump administration first considered indexing capital gains taxes to inflation back in 2018, the Penn Wharton Budget Model projected that 63% of the benefits would flow to the richest 0.1%—those making tens of millions per year—while 86% would go to the top 1%.
Those in the bottom 90% of earners would see just over 2% of the overall benefits, with those in the bottom half receiving basically nothing.
According to the Post, the senators view lowering capital gains taxes as part of a GOP bid to "improve its economic approval rating with voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections," in which the party is expected to take a walloping, according to current polls.
Voters have not responded kindly to previous bills that handed lavish tax breaks to the rich. At the time of its passage, the OBBBA was one of the least popular pieces of legislation in modern history, with several polls showing nearly a 2-to-1 disapproval rating.
But Cruz and Scott are pushing for this policy change despite the public revulsion and the fact that the Department of Justice has previously ruled that the Treasury Department can't make policy without Congress' approval.
"Ted Cruz is asking the Treasury Department to break the law to give another round of tax breaks to the ultrarich," remarked Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. "These guys can't help themselves."
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Ted Cruz Says His Bill Will Allow DOJ to 'Prosecute' Those Who Fund No Kings Protests, Which Have Been Overwhelmingly Peaceful
"They want to ban protests," warned journalist Mehdi Hasan. "They want to kill the First Amendment."
Oct 16, 2025
Doubling down on efforts by Republicans to smear the peaceful “No Kings” protest movement as “terrorism,” Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday called for the passage of legislation he introduced earlier this year to “prosecute” those funding the protests.
This weekend, organizers expect millions to gather in over 2,500 locations around the country in protest against President Donald Trump, including at the National Mall in Washington, DC.
In a Fox News interview on Wednesday, Cruz (R-Texas) claimed that the rallies were funded by the billionaire liberal donor George Soros, whom the Trump administration has indicated it plans to target using the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“You look at this No Kings rally and there’s considerable evidence that George Soros and his network is behind funding these rallies, which may well be riots all across the country,” Cruz said. “So I’ve introduced legislation called the Stop FUNDERs Act that would add rioting to the list of predicate offenses for RICO.”
Cruz said that the legislation would allow the Department of Justice to “prosecute the money that is funding the antisemitic protests on campuses,” (referring to pro-Palestine protests), “the pro-open border protests in [Los Angeles] and other cities (protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and these ‘No King’ protests.”
RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has historically been used to prosecute organized crime leaders for violence carried out by members of their organizations.
In the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller suggested that RICO should be used as part of an effort to “dismantle” left-wing nonprofits, which he claimed have incited violence and terrorism through First Amendment-protected speech criticizing Kirk’s views.
Subsequent reporting from Reuters last week confirmed that the Trump administration was waging a “crackdown on the finances and activities of liberal nonprofits and groups opposed to his agenda,” describing it as “a multi-agency effort with top White House aide Stephen Miller playing a central role.”
Several Republicans, including Trump, have accused liberal nonprofits of funding “domestic terror networks” throughout the country, though they’ve presented little evidence for the assertion.
Soros’ group, the Open Society Foundations, has pushed back on the administration’s claims with a spokesperson stating: “Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations fund protests, condone violence, or foment it in any way. Claims to the contrary are false.”
While Cruz stated that his Stop FUNDERs Act, introduced in July, would protect “freedom of speech and peaceful protest,” the acronym “FUNDERs” is short for “Financial Underwriting of Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots,” which implies that even nonviolent protests deemed objectionable by the DOJ could be targeted.
There have already been several No Kings rallies around the country since Trump took office in January. The largest one, which took place on June 14, is estimated by the Crowd Counting Consortium to have had anywhere from 2 million to 4.8 million participants, making it the second-largest single day of nonviolent protest in the Trump era, second only to the nationwide Women’s Marches and other demonstrations following Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
The group’s analysis, published in August, examined thousands of events across the country and found that 99.5% of the reported protests had no injuries or property damage. Of the 10 documented events that did involve violence or property damage, it was often directed against the protesters. At one demonstration in Salt Lake City, an armed “safety volunteer” shot and killed a peaceful demonstrator and wounded another. In several other cases, police and opponents of the protests have brandished weapons at the demonstrators.
Their report also noted that “the No Kings coalition has hosted several online trainings... that have attracted hundreds of thousands of views. The July 16 virtual training was probably the largest nonviolence training in US history, with over 130,000 registered.”
As author Mike Rothschild noted on X, “previous No Kings protests have been so peaceful and anodyne that I’ve seen far-left folks complaining they aren’t accomplishing anything. There’s no conspiracy here, no Soros-paid agitators, just people walking and holding funny signs. You can’t make something out of nothing.”
Despite this, in the days leading up to this weekend’s No Kings protests, Republican leaders have attempted to portray it as a violent movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) described it as a “hate America rally” that would include “Antifa,” a group that the Trump administration has designated as a “domestic terrorist” organization and threatened with lethal military force. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said this weekend’s marches were being run by the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said that “we’ll have to get the National Guard out” to combat the demonstration, adding: “Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it.”
Responding to Cruz’s pledge to prosecute the funders of No Kings, Mehdi Hasan, founder of the media outlet Zeteo, warned: “They want to ban protests. It’s insane and should scare every American. They want to kill the First Amendment.”
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