Democratic attorneys general from 15 states are urging a federal judge to preserve their legal challenge against the Trump administration’s repeated invocation of a “national energy emergency” to advance fossil fuel projects.
The states are suing the president — as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, Interior Department and Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — for allegedly fast-tracking required environmental reviews on the grounds of responding to an energy emergency, in order to speed up projects favored by the Trump administration.
The Justice Department asked a federal court in Washington state to dismiss the case in March, claiming that the state attorneys general failed to show they had been deprived of their procedural rights and that any harms from the emergency procedures were “speculative.” The administration also argued that the states could still challenge individual permitting decisions if they disagreed with them.
That approach would require states to “engage in a game of judicial whack-a-mole, challenging one-by-one an onslaught of individual permitting decisions rather than the overarching policy directives Defendants issued that broadly facilitate pushing non-emergency projects through emergency procedures,” the Democratic attorneys general told the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in a filing Wednesday.
