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      Biden administration sides with climate lawsuit against fossil fuel companies

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      The US Department of Justice filed a legal brief Thursday in support of local governments in Colorado that are part of a growing wave of local and state governments pursuing climate litigation against fossil fuel companies.In the brief, the DoJ argued that the Colorado case against the Canadian energy giant Suncor should be heard in state court, which is considered more favourable than federal court for plaintiffs who are suing oil companies over climate change. ExxonMobile is also a defendant in the case.Experts say the DoJ brief is an action by the administration in support of climate litigation, fulfilling a campaign promise by President Joe Biden. “They’ve definitely come out on the side that the climate advocates wanted,” said Dan Farber, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.State and local governments across the country have filed lawsuits in recent years alleging that energy giants, including Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, failed to warn the public about the harms of fossil fuels and engaged in deception or misrepresentation about their products, resulting in devastating climate emergencies in those jurisdictions. In court filings, fossil fuel companies have argued that media coverage of climate change extends back to the 1950s but local governments continued to promote and encourage production and use of oil and gas.Supporters of the wave of climate lawsuits have compared them to cases against Big Tobacco in the 1990s that resulted in settlements of more than $200bn against cigarette companies. If the lawsuits are successful, they could change how firms do business, compel companies to pay for climate adaptation, and reinforce banking industry concerns that fossil fuels are a risky investment.Since the first lawsuits were filed in California in 2017, oil companies have removed them to federal court, which they see as friendlier to their arguments. But the plaintiffs have maintained that the cases belong in state court.In 2018, local governments in Colorado sued fossil fuel companies seeking damages for the companies’ role in causing climate change. The local governments said they incurred heavy costs from worsening heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, and that ExxonMobil Corporation and Suncor Energy Inc. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Colorado has abundant fossil fuel reserves, and two operating petroleum refineries located in Denver – one of them operated by Suncor.The lawsuit claims the companies “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.”The case made it up to the tenth circuit appeals court, which agreed with the plaintiffs that the case should be heard in state court. The supreme court, now dominated by conservative judges, will weigh in on that issue.To aid in that decision, the supreme court invited Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to file a brief expressing the views of the United States government on whether the case belongs in federal court. Prelogar had the option to support the state court argument by the Colorado counties, which she did in a filing on Thursday.Asked whether a Colorado case should be removed to federal court, Prelogar argued that the petition should be denied. “Respondents brought this suit in state court, alleging only state-law claims,” she wrote. “Under the well-pleaded complaint rule, respondents’ claims do not present a federal question, and petitioners have identified no sound basis for recharacterizing those claims.”The attorney for Suncor Energy did not immediately respond to request for comment.Farber said the brief is “laser-focused” on the question of whether the cases should be in federal court, and does not make any broader arguments about the climate litigation.The sSupreme Court now has two options – it can either decline to hear the case, or it can take up the case. If it declines to hear the case, then the lower court decision stands, and the lawsuit goes back to state court – a win for the plaintiffs that would have a ripple effect on other climate litigation, and all the cases would be heard in state court, Farber said.If the supreme court decides to hear the case, oral arguments could happen in the fall and the court could issue a decision in 2024. In that scenario, all the climate cases before the courts would be on pause until the decision comes down, he said.“There could be some complicated issues about how to handle some of the individual cases, but I think basically the result would be that things would more or less stand still until the court either decides to hear this case or decides not to hear it,” Farber said.Richard Wiles, president for the Center for Climate Integrity, was delighted by the federal government’s brief. “We’re obviously very pleased with this decision,” he said over the phone. “The DoJ came down on the side of every other federal judge that has looked at this.” He said there is consensus in the courts and the legal community is that the cases belong in state court.As for the Biden administration, he said, “You can definitely say they made good on their promise to strategically support these cases.” More

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      Pat Schroeder, Democrat and feminist pioneer in Congress, dies aged 82

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      Pat Schroeder, a pioneer for women’s and family rights in Congress who confronted and angered conservatives, has died. She was 82.Schroeder’s former press secretary, Andrea Camp, said the former congresswoman suffered a stroke recently and died on Monday in Celebration, Florida.Schroeder took on the elite for 24 years, shaking up institutions by forcing them to acknowledge women had a role in government. Her unorthodox methods cost her key committee posts but Schroeder said she wasn’t willing to join “the good old boys’ club”. Unafraid of embarrassing colleagues in public, she became a feminist hero.Schroeder was elected in Colorado in 1972 and won re-election 11 times from a safe district in Denver. Despite her seniority, she was never appointed to lead a committee.She helped forge several Democratic majorities before leaving in 1997. Her parting shot was a book, 24 Years of Housework … and the Place is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics.In 1987, Schroeder tested the waters for the presidency, after her fellow Coloradan Gary Hart pulled out. Announcing she would not run, she said her heart was not in it and fundraising was demeaning.Schroeder said legislators spent too much attention on donors. When in 1994 House Republicans gathered on the Capitol steps to celebrate 100 days in power, she and several aides climbed to the dome and hung a 15-ft red banner reading: “Sold.”She was the first woman on the House armed services committee but was forced to share a seat with Ron Dellums of California, the first African American. Schroeder said the chair, F Edward Hebert of Louisiana, thought the committee was no place for a woman or an African American and they were each worth only half a seat.Republicans were livid when Schroeder and others filed an ethics complaint over a televised lecture series given by the speaker, Newt Gingrich, charging that free cable time amounted to an illegal gift. Gingrich became the first speaker reprimanded by Congress. He said he regretted not taking Schroeder and her allies more seriously.According to her House biography, Schroeder once told Pentagon officials that if they were women, they would always be pregnant because they never said no.Asked by one congressman how she could be a mother of two small children and a congresswoman, she replied: “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.”It was Schroeder who branded Ronald Reagan the Teflon president for his ability to avoid blame.One of her biggest victories was the signing of a family leave bill in 1993, providing job protection for care of a newborn, sick child or parent.“Pat Schroeder blazed the trail,” said Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat who took over from Schroeder as chair of the congressional caucus on women’s issues. “Every woman in this house is walking in her footsteps.”A pilot, Schroeder earned her way through Harvard law school with her own flying service. She became a professor at Princeton and led the Association of American Publishers. But she continued working in politics after moving to Florida. She campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016.Schroeder was born in Portland, Oregon, on 30 July 1940. She graduated from the University of Minnesota before earning her law degree. From 1964 to 1966 she was a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board.She is survived by her husband, James W Schroeder, whom she married in 1962, their children, Scott and Jamie, her brother, Mike Scott, and four grandchildren. More

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      Colorado Republicans pick election denier as ‘wartime’ state party leader

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      Colorado Republicans pick election denier as ‘wartime’ state party leaderDave Williams backs Trump voter fraud lie and tried to insert ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ anti-Biden meme into his name on ballotThe Colorado Republican party on Saturday selected as its new chair a former state representative and committed election denier who promised to be a “wartime” leader.The election-denying Republicans who aided Trump’s ‘big lie’ and got promotedRead moreSeveral other state Republican parties have recently elected far-right figures and election conspiracy theorists to top posts.The move in Colorado comes with the party on the brink of irrelevance in a state moving swiftly left.Dave Williams, who unsuccessfully tried to insert the anti-Biden meme “Let’s Go Brandon” into his name on the Republican primary ballot last year and backs Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, was selected by the state executive committee from a seven-person field.Williams crossed the required 50% threshold on the third ballot after being endorsed by the indicted former Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who failed to pass 10%. Peters faces seven felony charges for illegally accessing voting machines. She has denied the allegations while becoming a prominent figure in the election conspiracy movement.A three-term state representative from Colorado Springs, Williams challenged Doug Lamborn in the Republican congressional primary last year. The Colorado secretary of state rejected his effort to include a popular conservative phrase denigrating Joe Biden on the ballot.In a speech to nearly 400 hardcore activists and party leaders on Saturday, Williams reprised a key theme from his campaign: that poor performance in Colorado is simply due to not fighting hard enough, not any disconnect with voters.“Our party doesn’t have a brand problem,” Williams said. “Our party has a problem with feckless leaders … We need a wartime leader.”Election deniers have won state party chair positions in Idaho, Kansas and Michigan.In Colorado, Republicans lost every statewide election last year by double digits and are down to their lowest share of the state legislature in history. They have not won a major statewide race since 2014 and lag well behind Democrats and unaffiliated voters in registration.Like six of the seven candidates who ran for chair, Williams advocated trying to overturn a ballot measure that requires the party to allow unaffiliated voters to take part in its primary. All of the candidates except Kevin McCarney, a former Mesa county party chairman, expressed skepticism that Biden won the 2020 election.Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyRead moreWilliams’s main rival was Erik Aadland, a combat veteran and political novice who ran an unsuccessful race for a congressional swing seat in the Denver suburbs last year.Aadland has also questioned the 2020 election results but this time advocated for discussing elections in less aggressive language, basing his speech on Saturday around the theme of how “love trumps hate”.But Aadland also spoke in combative terms about how the party should move forward after Williams’s selection.“We are besought by a radical left that wants to destroy this country, and we need to come together and win elections,” Aadland said.TopicsColoradoRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Trump Lawyer Admits to Falsehoods in 2020 Fraud Claims

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      Jenna Ellis acknowledged that she knowingly misrepresented the facts about election fraud in a disciplinary procedure by Colorado state bar officials.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who represented President Donald J. Trump after his loss in the 2020 election, admitted in a sworn statement released on Wednesday that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Mr. Trump’s defeat.The admissions by Ms. Ellis were part of an agreement to accept public censure and settle disciplinary measures brought against her by state bar officials in Colorado, her home state. Last year, the officials opened an investigation of Ms. Ellis after a complaint from the 65 Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group. The group accused her of professional misconduct in her efforts to help Mr. Trump promote his claims of voting fraud and undertake “a concerted effort to overturn the legitimate 2020 presidential election results.”According to the statement, some of Ms. Ellis’s lies about election fraud were made during appearances on Fox News, several of whose top hosts and executives were recently shown to have disparaged Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in private even though they supported them in public. The revelations about these discrepancies have emerged in a series of court filings by Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-machine company that filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox for promoting a conspiracy theory about its role in the election results.Ms. Ellis, part of the so-called elite strike force of lawyers that took to the air and traveled across the country in support of Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, is also embroiled in the Justice Department’s investigation of the former president’s sprawling efforts to reverse his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. As part of the investigation — which was taken over in November by a special counsel, Jack Smith — dozens of grand jury subpoenas have been issued, many of which have requested information about Ms. Ellis.In a message posted on Twitter Thursday morning, Ms. Ellis sought to split hairs concerning her agreement with officials in Colorado, saying that she never admitted to lying about election fraud, which she asserted “requires INTENTIONALLY making a false statement.”But in her stipulation with bar officials, she agreed that censure was merited when lawyers “knowingly engage” in any “conduct that involves dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”“It appears that Ms. Ellis is continuing in her pattern of knowing misrepresentations and falsehoods,” Michael Teter, the managing director of the 65 Project, said on Thursday. “If she continues down this path, it will not be long before she is subject to further disciplinary action.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.When she joined Mr. Trump’s legal team, Ms. Ellis liked to describe herself as a “constitutional law attorney,” although a review of her professional history by The New York Times, as well as interviews with more than a half-dozen lawyers who worked with her, showed that she was not the seasoned constitutional law expert she claimed.As part of her public censure, Ms. Ellis agreed that her legal work for Mr. Trump “caused actual harm by undermining the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.” Bar officials noted in the statement that “a selfish motive” and “a pattern of misconduct” were aggravating factors in the case.Ms. Ellis admitted to 10 misrepresentations of the facts during her work for Mr. Trump, beginning within weeks of the election’s being called for Mr. Biden.On Nov. 20, 2020, for example, Ms. Ellis appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business describing the evidence that Mr. Trump’s legal team had collected to support their claims of fraud — a position that she now acknowledges was untrue.“We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation,” she falsely claimed on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, “we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret.”Two weeks later, Ms. Ellis appeared on Jeanine Pirro’s show on Fox and declared that Mr. Trump’s legal team had discovered more than 500,000 votes in Arizona “that were cast illegally.” She acknowledged in the statement issued on Wednesday that this claim was also false. 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      Lauren Boebert, Far-Right Firebrand, Wins Re-election After Recount

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      Ms. Boebert defeated Adam Frisch in Colorado’s Republican-leaning Third District to win a second term in the House.After a recount in a remarkably close race, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, known for heckling President Biden during his State of the Union speech, arming herself on Capitol Hill and ignoring Covid mask rules, won her bid for a second term. Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, announced the results on Monday.Ms. Boebert, 35, staved off a fierce challenge from Adam Frisch, a Democratic businessman and former Aspen, Colo., city councilman, in the state’s Republican-leaning Third District.Mr. Frisch, who faced a deficit of roughly 500 votes out of more than 327,000 cast, gained just two votes in the automatic recount. In the end, Ms. Boebert won with 50.06 percent of the vote, to Mr. Frisch’s 49.89 percent.On Twitter on Sunday, before the recount was made official by the secretary of state, Ms. Boebert said: “Our conservative policies will help all Americans to overcome the challenges we face so each of us has the opportunity to live our very best life. Thank you for entrusting me to help lead the way. I’ll be working every day to prove I can get the job done right.”Mr. Frisch had sought to cast Ms. Boebert as a flamethrower in an increasingly polarized Congress, saying she was focused more on placating the Republican Party’s far-right Trump wing than on reducing inflation and adding jobs.He presented himself in a television ad as not a typical Democrat, saying that he would not vote for Representative Nancy Pelosi for House speaker and that he supported border security. He showed footage of himself hunting with a shotgun.But a disadvantage in name recognition and the makeup of voters in the district proved too much for Mr. Frisch to overcome against Ms. Boebert, who has drawn national attention for her incendiary actions.On Monday evening, he released a statement on his loss. “While we hoped for a different outcome,” Mr. Frisch said, “we defied incredible odds with the closeness of this race.” He added, “I am confident that the coalition of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters we built throughout this campaign to reject hate and extremism in Southern and Western Colorado will grow into the future.”Along with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a fellow Republican also in her first term, Ms. Boebert brought a no-holds-barred brand of politics to the House, feeding off a social media echo chamber of loyalists who backed former President Donald J. Trump. That has put Ms. Boebert at odds with platforms like Twitter, which temporarily suspended her account after she spread the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged.Her rhetoric and her style of politics also made her a target of Democrats during the Republican primary, many of whom crossed party lines to support her Republican challenger, driven by fears of her extremism.Ms. Boebert won her seat in Congress in 2020, when she unseated a five-term incumbent in the Republican primary before going on to win the general election. Until then, she had run a gun-themed restaurant in Colorado’s ranch country — the Shooters Grill — where she encouraged staff members to carry firearms and defied restrictions by staying open during the pandemic. More

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      Democrats issue fresh calls for assault weapons ban after shooting tragedies

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      Democrats issue fresh calls for assault weapons ban after shooting tragediesQuestions also raised about the funding of law enforcement agencies in places that refuse to enforce so-called red flag laws Gun control returned as a leading topic over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, with Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats issuing fresh calls for a ban on assault weapons for the general public.At the same time, questions were raised about the funding of law enforcement agencies in places that refuse to enforce so-called red flag laws, after shooting tragedies in Virginia and Colorado in the last two weeks.“If you passed an assault weapons ban you would see less mass shootings in this country,” Connecticut’s Democratic US Senator and leading gun control advocate, Chris Murphy, said on Sunday.He added: “You are not going to magically eliminate mass-shootings, but an AR-15, or AR-15 style weapon, is generally the choice of mass shooters.”Such a military-style rifle was used in the shooting at an LGBTQ night club in Colorado last weekend, although different firearms were used in the shootings of University of Virginia football team players earlier in the month and at a Walmart store, also in Virginia, two days before Thanksgiving, in a tragic spate of violence.‘It’s the guns’: violent week in a deadly year prompts familiar US responsesRead moreThe Democrat lawmaker pointed to a “dramatic decline” in mass-shootings after the decade-long assault weapons ban passed in 1994. “It wasn’t until the expiration date of the ban that we started to see mass shootings spiral up”.With Biden returning to the White House on Sunday afternoon after spending the Thanksgiving break with his family in Nantucket, the gun issue returned to prominence.On Thursday’s Thanksgiving day itself, Biden spoke about the “scourge” of gun violence, saying he wants to sign into law a ban on high-powered guns that have the capacity to kill many people quickly.“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. Just sick,” Biden said. “I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”The Democratic-led House passed legislation in July to revive the 1990s-era ban on assault weapons, following the passage of a landmark bipartisan bill on guns, strengthening background checks and red flag laws, which allow authorities to remove firearms from those posing a danger.Colorado Springs shooter had allegedly threatened his mother with a bomb. Why could he still get a gun?Read moreBut the legislation is going nowhere in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass and Democrats lack Republican support.House majority whip Jim Clyburn admitted that an assault weapons ban and other gun restrictions would not get through Congress, even in the lame duck session while Democrats still control the House, but that did not mean it was not worth pursuing.“Just because it’s legal [to buy a gun] doesn’t mean it’s the right thing. Slavery was legal but it was not right,” he said.Murphy, who has been the Senate’s leading advocate for stronger gun control since at a school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, also told CNN on Sunday that one avenue Democrats might pursue is to restrict federal funding for law enforcement in counties that declare themselves gun sanctuaries.“We learned in Colorado that the county in which the shooting happened was a so-called second amendment sanctuary state,” Murphy said. “The majority of counties in this country have declared that they’re not going enforce state and federal gun laws.”“It’s a growing problem in the country and we’re going to have to have a conversation about that in the Senate. Do we want to to continue to supply funding to law enforcement in counties that refuse to implement state and federal gun laws?”Red flag laws, Murphy added, had proved wildly popular across the county but “we have to do something” about the refusal by 60% of counties to enforce gun control laws.On NBC, Kentucky Republican congressman James Comer said in respect of any additional gun regulations: “We already have many gun laws on the books … the number one priority with respect to crime in America for Republicans is going to be the fentanyl crisis” with respect to the traffic in illicit drugs across the US-Mexico border.NBC’s Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, noted to Comer that “the states that have the most gun [control] laws have the least amount of per capita gun crime, and the states with the least amount of gun laws seem to have the most … so there is a correlation here, if you have more gun-related laws on the books as a state you have … fewer gun-related deaths. That’s been proven statistically.”Comer responded that in rural America most households had guns and “there aren’t a lot of crimes” because criminals know people are armed.TopicsUS gun controlColoradoUS politicsJoe BidenDemocratsnewsReuse this content More