Whitehouse, Padilla, Schiff, Carbajal Lead Colleagues in Brief Challenging the Trump Administration’s Illegal Overreach to Restart the Sable Offshore Oil Pipeline

Lawmakers’ brief urges Ninth Circuit to reverse district court’s decision, issue preliminary injunction

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Representative Salud Carbajal (D-CA-24), led an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of California v. Wright, challenging the Trump administration’s illegal overreach to restart the Sable Offshore Oil Pipeline.

Last month, the lawmakers submitted a brief in this case to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California explaining that the Trump Administration’s use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to restart the Sable Offshore oil pipeline grossly misuses the statute’s national defense intent for a corporate rescue mission to bail out the Administration’s political allies.  The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ignored the evidence of pay-to-play corruption and allowed the pipeline to continue operating.

The lawmakers’ latest brief reasserts that the Administration’s DPA Order fails to justify invoking this extraordinary authority.  “DOE relies on vague national defense justifications of questionable relevance for the Order but fails to articulate why Sable’s crude-oil production and operation … are ‘necessary’ for national defense …. The Order fails to identify any specific military need for crude oil or even explain how Sable’s crude will be refined and ultimately distributed for military use. …. Sable does not produce the type of refined products that the military purchases, and the Wright Order identifies no supply-chain mechanism that would ensure that Sable’s crude is ultimately used by the military.”

The Administration’s weak national defense justification “does not relieve a court of determining whether the Executive Branch has, in good faith, established the statutory prerequisites that Congress imposed on the exercise of national-defense judgments and associated statutory authority .… [The prerequisites] are safeguards that Congress deliberately built into Title I—and refined over decades—to confine extraordinary federal intervention into private enterprise to circumstances in which prioritization or allocation is objectively necessary for national defense.”

The Trump Administration has repeatedly invoked spurious national security or emergency justifications to favor fossil fuel production: halting offshore wind projects, exempting Gulf oil and gas activity from endangered species protections, exempting dozens of coal plants from pollution control requirements, and prohibiting planned coal pant retirements.  This order to restart the Sable Offshore oil pipeline is the latest example of “an Administration hell-bent on expanding fossil-fuel production.”  Moreover, the project was helmed by a Trump donor, raising the specter of pay-to-play politics; DOE “intervened to rescue a favored political ally from financial ruin and bypass the state-law obstacles that had kept its pipelines idle for nearly eleven years.”

The lawmakers concluded, “The district court erred by accepting DOE’s national-defense rationale at face value rather than testing it against the statutory prerequisites, the record, and publicly available information …. the Court should reverse the district court’s denial of the preliminary injunction.”

Joining Whitehouse, Padilla, Schiff, and Carbajal, the amicus brief is co-signed by Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-18), Ted Lieu (D-CA-36), Nanette Díaz Barragán (D-CA-44), John Garamendi (D-CA-08), Robert Garcia (D-CA-42), Laura Friedman (D-CA-30), Mike Levin (D-CA-49), Dave Min (D-CA-47), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA-19), Brad Sherman (D-CA-32), and Mike Thompson (D-CA-04).

Full text of the brief is available here. 

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