DAVID BLACKMON: Holding No Levers Of Power, Democrats Focus On Lawfare To Slow Trump Agenda

It is no secret that Republicans now control all levers of political power in the nation’s capital, with President Donald Trump now ensconced for his second term in office, holding narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, and with a solid originalist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. It is also no secret that, as its political might has faded over the last decade, the Democratic Party has come to rely increasingly on a variety of lawfare campaigns to impede the ability of Republicans to enact their agenda.

One early manifestation of Democrat lawfare efforts came when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi mounted her first sham impeachment targeting Trump in 2018 with Daniel Sachs Goldman serving as general counsel for the impeachment committee. That effort at political lawfare came up a crapper in the Senate, but Goldman has been rewarded by the party and its voters with a congressional seat representing the 10th district in New York.

Democrats and their supporting activist NGOs also fought Trump’s first term agenda with an organized lawfare effort to file challenges to most every administration initiative with friendly federal district judges who happily issued a seemingly endless series of nationwide injunctions designed to gum up the works. We saw another example of this on Tuesday when Biden-appointed federal district Judge Loren L. AliKhan blocked Trump’s order to temporarily pause federal grant, loan and financial assistance programs after 22 Democrat state attorneys general filed suit.

Georgia Democratic Sen.  Raphael Warnock responded to Trump’s order on Thursday by calling it “an assault on the American Republic and the attempt to replace it with their dystopian vision of the future,” adding, “We’ve got to fight back.” Obviously, lawfare will be his and his fellow Democrats’ favored tactic to deploy in that effort.

We can expect to see the same kinds of lawfare efforts by Democrats to attack every aspect of the Trump agenda, including his efforts to roll back the Biden Green New Deal energy agenda. The trouble for Democrats in this policy area, though, comes from the fact that the various lawfare campaigns they’ve mounted attacking the oil and gas industry in recent years have seen little real success.

One of the major coordinated lawfare campaigns left-leaning law firms and activist groups have mounted in recent years has involved an array of coordinating state and local jurisdictions suing oil and gas companies over alleged negative impacts related to carbon emissions. That effort has experienced a series of setbacks in recent months, as courts have ruled against claims filed by New York City, the city of Baltimore, the state of Delaware and the New York state attorney general targeting major companies like Shell, BP and ExxonMobil. While the city and county of Honolulu did claim a favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in early January, the net impact of it was simply to send the case back to a state court for reconsideration. 

This emissions lawfare campaign suffered another setback on Jan. 24 when the circuit court in Ann Arundel County, Maryland, dismissed lawsuits filed by the city of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, citing previous opinions rejecting similar cases. 

“Upon further review, this court is now persuaded that the logic of the disposition and the authorities cited by Senior Judge Videtta A. Brown in the Baltimore Case, the ruling by the Superior Court Judge in the Delaware case, and the ruling in the New York Case as well as the Second Circuit’s affirmance of that ruling compel dismissal of these cases for Court’s decision last July to dismiss the reasons stated below,” Anne Arundel Circuit Judge Steve Platt wrote in his decision. 

The fact that these adverse decisions for the mounters of these lawfare efforts are coming in Democrat-heavy blue states does not bode well for Democrat hopes of real success in defeating the Trump energy and climate agenda with this lawfare-centered strategy. But when your political quiver is down to a single arrow, the only available tactic is to fire the arrow you have.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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