Most Americans see the vital importance of America being the leader in artificial intelligence and the enormous need for electricity to support it. They recognize that with President Donald Trump’s reindustrialization of America, we must have more power to drive the boom in blue-collar jobs.
They also know that in the face of all of this new demand, we must increase the supply of fossil fuels, particularly clean natural gas, and become energy dominant if we are going to keep gas and electric bills affordable.
Most people also know that Democrats and left-wing climate activists oppose American energy dominance through the development of fossil fuels, but they likely don’t know that the biggest obstacle today is a court whose territory doesn’t have a single well, liquefied natural gas terminal, or pipeline — the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.
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In my own state of Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale’s natural gas helped turn America into a net energy exporter for the first time in decades, Democrats were between a rock and a hard place.
Former President Joe Biden and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) initially supported a total ban on fracking. Both, however, changed their position when they realized it was political suicide. Biden knew better than to cripple the economy of the country’s biggest swing state. However, he spent his entire administration increasing the demand for electricity by pushing electric vehicle mandates and expensive, unreliable alternative energy, while banning offshore drilling and limiting the use of federal lands for energy production in America.
The result? China got rich selling us electric vehicle batteries and solar panels. America got poorer and more dependent on foreign energy.
Voters in Pennsylvania and across the nation rejected Democrats’ climate alarmism last year. But instead of admitting defeat, these activists, with the notable recent exception of Bill Gates, have continued their war on American energy by other means.
One way they’ve tried to circumvent the will of the people is by having blue states and cities sue energy companies for “climate damages.” New Jersey’s Democratic attorney general tried this a few years ago, but a judge threw the case out in February.
In his decision, Judge Douglas Hurd rightly concluded that carbon emissions fall under congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Otherwise, as the Justice Department pointed out in a recent legal brief, “every locality in the country could sue essentially anyone in the world for contributing to global climate change.”
But not all judges are as clear-sighted as Hurd. Courts have allowed similar lawsuits from the city governments of Boulder, Colorado, and Honolulu to move forward.
The precedent their rulings threaten to establish would cripple America’s energy industry. Companies won’t be able to keep the lights on — their own, or anyone else’s — if they’re busy fighting off hundreds of billion-dollar blue-city climate shakedowns.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court is likely to step in soon and reimpose sanity.
Boulder’s lawyers will probably make inaccurate, convoluted arguments about federalism, but it’s obvious that climate activists don’t really care about states’ rights. Their only real principle is that fossil fuels are bad. Any argument that prevents America from expanding energy production is good enough for them.
That’s why the same climate groups can be die-hard localists in the Boulder and Honolulu cases but staunch federal supremacists when it comes to venue requirements for other environmental lawsuits.
And nowhere is that hypocrisy more destructive than in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where American energy projects go to die.
When climate activists sue to block the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s federally approved pipelines, power plants, or export terminals, they almost always file in the D.C. Circuit. That’s intentional because, time after time, that court does its bidding — halting projects, rewriting energy and environmental policy from the bench, and handing victories to the same activists who lost at the ballot box.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that this one court can completely paralyze national infrastructure. Pipelines, transmission lines, and LNG export terminals sit in limbo for years because of endless D.C. Circuit litigation. These delays kill jobs, drive up costs, and scare off future investment.
The Left likes to talk about “no kings,” but they love these kings at court. It’s a judicial veto over the agenda of the elected government that the public chose. Unelected judges in Washington, D.C., are deciding whether energy workers in Pennsylvania, Texas, or North Dakota can build FERC-approved projects in their own backyards.
It makes no sense for a single capital court with no local stake to have the power to freeze projects thousands of miles away. The D.C. Circuit should never have jurisdiction over cases that belong in local circuits familiar with the economic and environmental realities at play.
Lawmakers should require that challenges be heard in the circuit where the project is physically located, not in a court packed with political activists 1,500 miles from the nearest pipeline. Local federal courts can weigh real-world costs and benefits far better than ideological judges in Washington.
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The D.C. Circuit’s stranglehold on U.S. energy policy is not just undemocratic. It’s also a national security threat, as America’s adversaries benefit every time an American project dies in that courtroom. Congress must fix this broken system.
Once the Supreme Court and Congress get this judge-shopping roadblock out of the way, Trump can finally do what he was elected to do: deliver a new Golden Age and the energy dominance necessary to fuel it.
Rick Santorum is a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.
