The Obama administration may be unraveling the very fabric of U.S. democracy by holding up the approval of the Dakota Access oil pipeline after a federal court said it could move ahead, a coalition of diverse industry groups said in a letter sent Thursday night to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other federal agency officials.
“We write to express our deep concerns over recent actions that took place in North Dakota to effectively ignore the rule of law in an attempt to halt infrastructure development,” the letter reads, reminding Lynch that “one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, once wrote that the United States is a ‘government of laws, and not of men.'”
The Dakota Access pipeline has become a symbol for the environmentalist movement in recent weeks, where activists and some Democrats have galvanized opposition against the pipeline as an affront to tribal rights and as a way to combat climate change. But with the pipeline going through two federal courts for review, and both saying it can go forward, it would appear that politics is taking over where the law has left off, say observers.
The administration stepped in to halt the oil pipeline’s construction after a federal judge in North Dakota last month said it was OK to move forward, as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe appealed the ruling before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court issued its decision in favor of the developers on Oct. 9, coincidentally the day of the second presidential debate.
The tribe had argued that the pipeline’s route would threaten the tribe’s only source of drinking water, while saying the developer had already harmed grave sites and other areas sacred to the Sioux.
“This North Dakota project has complied with the procedures laid out in law, engaged in more than two years of federal review and has received the necessary federal approvals,” the letter added. “Additionally, the project has been fully approved by all four states it traverses.”
The groups said the tribe and others had ample opportunity to raise their concerns during the federal and state review process.
“Throughout this entire process, there are multiple opportunities for stakeholder engagement, whether through public fora or through written submittal,” the letter states. “If stakeholders disagree with the government’s final decision, there is a judicial process in place to address those concerns.”
“Despite the federal judge’s opinion, your agencies then jointly denied access to federal property necessary to complete the pipeline until the administration ‘can determine whether it will need to reconsider any of its previous decisions’ under various federal laws,” the groups said. “The previous decisions now being ‘reconsidered’ were properly considered and made through a fair and thorough process on which the company and others are entitled to rely.
“In our ‘nation of laws,’ when an established legal process is complete, it is just that — complete,” the letter added. “When your agencies upend or modify the results of a full and fair regulatory process for an infrastructure project, these actions do not merely impact a single company. The industries that manufacture and develop the infrastructure, the labor that builds it, and the American consumers that depend on it all suffer.”
The letter concluded by urging Lynch, Secretary of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Eric Fanning and Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell to “abide by the well-established process and the law and help us build an infrastructure system suitable to the demands of the 21st century.”
The letter included more than 20 trade groups representing not only the oil and gas industry, but also the investor-owned electric utilities, the chemical industry, paper mills, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and builders and steel workers.
