Congress must streamline federal environmental regulations and preempt state laws, or the nation’s energy producers will continue to be handicapped by climate-related litigation often sponsored by foreign financiers, including—some alleged in a recent Senate hearing—by the Chinese Communist Party.
Acknowledging he’s a “strong opponent” of preemption—when a higher level of government precludes, or “preempts,” actions by those below—Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said the matrix of federal, state, and local environmental legislation adopted since the 1970s is ripe for litigative exploitation.
“Congress should preempt state laws, and courts should read between the lines of congressional statutes to find preemption,” Kobach said during a June 25 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights Subcommittee.
A driving Trump administration theme is trimming federal laws to make compliance less costly, time-consuming, and confusing. Whittling back the realm of statutory superfluity in often-redundant federal, state, and local regulations related to the environment and energy production is among its primary aims.
Kobach called on senators to go beyond deregulation “so that we have a uniform national policy.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said there’s urgency in doing so because entities associated with China are allegedly taking advantage of the nation’s courts to subsidize “the left’s lawfare against American energy dominance.”
“We’re witnessing a systematic campaign against American energy, a coordinated assault by the radical left backed and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, to seize control of our courts, to weaponize litigation against U.S. energy producers, all to undermine American energy dominance,” he said.
Cruz outlined a “three-pronged assault” spearheaded by “dark money entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party” that pay “activist lawyers to flood our courts with lawsuits” and influence campaigns.
Even more insidious, he said, is the Union of Concerned Scientists’ seminars for judges that have “quietly captured and brainwashed the judiciary itself” in “closed-door trainings that indoctrinate judges to adopt the ideological goals of the ‘climate lawfare machine.’”
