“Donald Trump’s return to the White House could be “catastrophic” for clean energy, particularly the still struggling offshore wind industry, a top Biden administration official says.
Eric Beightel, who is in charge of coordinating infrastructure approvals across federal agencies, told the POLITICO Energy podcast he is “somewhat terrified” that a second Trump presidency would be “catastrophic to our hopes and dreams of our clean energy transition.”
“What we saw during the last Trump administration is that offshore wind essentially stood still,” Beightel said during an interview for the podcast posted Thursday. “And what we’ve had to do since coming in was to pick that up.
“If we had to do that again, coupled with the previous supply chain issues that we’ve already had to reconcile, that could be a death knell to this nascent industry,” said Beightel, executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council.”
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“Trump’s administration took action in line with the ex-president’s views: In 2019, it delayed the Vineyard Wind project — a 62-turbine facility planned for the waters off Martha’s Vineyard — by ordering more environmental reviews that critics said were intended to block its construction. (That project eventually passed muster with Biden’s regulators and recently started sending power to the electric grid.)
The prospect of a second Trump administration is emerging at a time when wind projects are caught in the middle of a struggle between Democrats and Republicans over how to rewrite federal permitting rules for energy infrastructure. Both parties agree on the need to approve energy projects more quickly — but the parties’ priorities remain far apart, as Republicans focus on smoothing the path for pipelines and natural gas export terminals while most Democrats emphasize electricity transmission projects to carry wind, solar and other renewable power.”
“In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment — even if the outcome would be cruel, needlessly painful or simply unjustified. The effect of this new hostility to delay is most sharply felt in the death penalty context. But a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.
Justice Neil Gorsuch set the tone for this approach in 2019, when he complained that legal challenges to the death penalty were often used to stall or even derail execution. Courts, said Gorsuch, should “police carefully against attempts” to use constitutional challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay.” In particular, he warned, “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”
The court has since followed Gorsuch’s lead with an unsavory relish. Before 2020 and the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was common for the Supreme Court to grant stays to hear legal questions that arose at the last stage of a capital case. Since then, it has only granted two such stays. In the same period, it has also vacated nine stays on death sentences imposed by lower courts.
The result has been predictable: Many of the convictions the court has let stand are plausibly described as “riddled with errors.” And in January, the court declined to hear a challenge to Alabama’s novel use of nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Smith. Witnesses described Smith’s resulting death as horrific — extended and torturous — and not at all painless as the state promised.
The same is true of federal prosecutions. In the last half of 2020, the court stepped aside as the federal government sprinted to execute 13 people — as many as had been killed in the previous six decades. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the court “repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes” to enable an “expedited spree of executions.” In its haste to see punishment done, the court waved away its usual rules.
Outside the capital punishment cases, the Supreme Court has added more and more constraints upon prisoners’ ability to challenge constitutional errors. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas in particular have urged that the longstanding right to challenge state court convictions in federal court be effectively gutted. The effect of their proposal would be to streamline even further the criminal justice process — shutting down almost all efforts to raise objections before they had even started.
All this makes the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Trump’s appeal for absolute immunity from all criminal charges even more unusual, and troubling.
Start with the weakness of Trump’s argument. There is absolutely no constitutional text, no precedent and no authority in the original debates over the Constitution’s ratification to support the idea for a former president’s absolute immunity. The argument advanced by Trump’s counsel is patently absurd. The idea that senators could impeach a president who threatened them with deadly violence and so no criminal justice process is needed, is facetious. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals rightly ridiculed it — and issued a comprehensive, tightly reasoned and unanimous opinion that presented no good cause for further review.
Trump is within his right to appeal the decision, but there’s no good reason for the Supreme Court to take it up and review it as a matter of law — especially given how thorough the D.C. Circuit was.
In fact, the court’s erstwhile concern with “unjustified delay” in criminal cases would seem to cut hard against hearing the case. It is, after all, a matter of common knowledge that the former president’s legal strategy is to run out the clock and thus prevent a trial prior to the election. Here then is a case where justice delayed may well be justice derailed.
Indeed, the grounds for the court rejecting Trump’s request to take up the immunity question appear much stronger than in Kenneth Smith’s challenge to the use of nitrogen gas. If Smith had been successful, Alabama could have found another, permissible way to kill him. If Trump’s trial is delayed enough, it may never happen. If Trump is back in the White House, he can easily quash the Justice Department’s case.
The Supreme Court’s attention, moreover, is a precision good. In the court’s 2022-23 term, the court issued just 58 decisions. Given that this scarce commodity is so infrequently used to prevent the miscarriage of criminal justice, the question must be asked: Why now? And why for this defendant?
There is no good answer. It is hard to see any legally sound reason why the Supreme Court should have decided to step in to hear Trump’s implausible and constitutionally destructive claim for absolute criminal immunity — especially when it has refused to hear so many other criminal defendants’ far more meritorious claims.”
“A trove of documents released this week reveal extraordinary new details about the role of Kenneth Chesebro — a once-obscure conservative attorney — in driving the strategy to keep Donald Trump in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election.
Communications between Chesebro and a top Trump campaign lawyer in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, show that Chesebro argued just days after the Nov. 3, 2020 election that creating a “cloud of confusion” by submitting dueling slates of electors would be enough to keep Joe Biden from becoming president.”
“The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Trump’s DC criminal trial, the one concerning his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, must be delayed for at least another two months. The Court already effectively delayed his trial for an additional two and a half months in an order handed down last December.
This order is a colossal victory for Trump, and could potentially allow him to evade criminal responsibility for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election altogether. Trump’s goal is to delay his trials until after Election Day. Should he prevail in that election, he can then order the Justice Department to drop all federal charges against him.
Trump was able to secure such an order from the justices by exploiting the fact that the federal judiciary ordinarily does not allow two different courts to have jurisdiction over the same case at the same time. So, when a party to a lawsuit or criminal proceeding appeals a trial court’s decision, the trial court often loses authority over that case until the appeal is resolved.
The ostensible reason for the Court’s order putting the trial on ice is that the Court needs that time to consider a weak appeal challenging a ruling by Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge presiding over his DC criminal trial.
According to Trump, the Constitution forbids any prosecution of a former president for any “official acts” he engaged in while in office. The implications of this argument are astounding, and Trump’s lawyers haven’t exactly tried to hide them. During one court hearing, the former president’s lawyer told a judge that Trump could not be prosecuted even if he had ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” unless Trump were also impeached and convicted by the Senate.”
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“Yet Trump has now, with Wednesday’s ruling, leveraged this ridiculous legal argument to delay his DC trial for at least four and a half months, and the delay will likely extend much longer because the Court will need time to produce an opinion. The Court will hear oral arguments in late April.
Simply put, Wednesday’s order is a disaster for anyone hoping that Trump may face trial before the November election. And, because the nominal reason for this order is to give the justices more time to decide if the president is completely above the law, this decision raises serious doubts about whether this Court can be trusted to oversee Trump-related cases in a nonpartisan manner.”
“The Court’s latest decision, Trump v. Anderson, took on the question of whether a provision of the 14th Amendment, which prevents former high-ranking officials who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from serving in a high office again, disqualifies Trump from office. Their answer is as big a victory as Trump could have hoped for.
The five-justice majority opinion does not simply hold that Trump may seek the presidency again, despite his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It effectively neutralizes this provision of the 14th Amendment altogether — at least as applied to the 2024 election.
All nine justices agreed that the state of Colorado, whose highest court determined that Trump was disqualified, was not allowed to make this determination. As the Court’s three Democratic appointees write in a cosigned opinion dissenting from the majority’s reasoning, states have limited authority to decide questions that “‘implicate a uniquely important national interest’ extending beyond a State’s ‘own borders.’” So the decision whether or not to disqualify Trump should have come from a federal court, or some other federal forum, not from state courts.
Fair enough, but the majority opinion (which is unsigned, and joined by all of the Court’s Republican appointees except for Justice Amy Coney Barrett) goes much further than that. It holds that the Constitution “empowers Congress” — and only Congress — to determine which individuals are disqualified from public office because they previously engaged in an insurrection.
Then it points to a single statute, a criminal law that calls for imprisonment and disqualification from office for anyone who “engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof” as the sole existing vehicle to enforce the 14th Amendment’s anti-insurrection provision. Trump has not yet been charged with violating this law, although he has been charged with violating other federal criminal laws because of his alleged attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.
This means that any attempt to disqualify Trump is almost certainly dead. Even if special counsel Jack Smith can amend his indictment to bring charges under the insurrection statute, the Court’s decision to slow-walk Trump’s trial means that the election will most likely be over before that trial takes place.
The courts, it is now crystal clear, are not going to do much of anything to prevent an insurrectionist former president from occupying the White House once again. And the Supreme Court appears to be actively running interference on Trump’s behalf.”
“To some extent, Trump’s argument that “A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY,” as he put it in an all-caps Truth Social post last week, mirrors the position his lawyers have taken in seeking dismissal of federal charges stemming from his attempts to remain in office after losing reelection in 2020. Although a former president can be prosecuted for “purely private conduct,” they say, he can be prosecuted for “official acts” only if they resulted in impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate.
As one judge noted when a skeptical D.C. Circuit panel probed the implications of that position earlier this month, it could literally give presidents a license to kill by ordering the assassination of their political opponents. Trump’s understanding of presidential immunity is, if anything, even broader.
“ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY,” Trump says, even when their actions “CROSS THE LINE” between legitimate exercises of presidential power and criminality. Otherwise, he warns, presidential “AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS” will be “STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER.””
The high court did not offer any comment on its decision, which means Powell, Wood and the other defendants must pay a total of $132,693.75 to the city of Detroit and another $19,639.75 in legal fees to the state of Michigan.
In their unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan, Powell, Wood and their co-defendants made wild claims in a lawsuit brought in the state alleging that Dominion voting machines were involved in fraud.
A district court judge ruled that the lawyers’ court challenges represented a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld the bulk of the district court judge’s ruling, calling the fraud claims “simply baseless.”
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the defendants continued to argue that they were simply pursuing “legitimate election challenges.”
Powell has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and has agreed to testify against Trump and 14 others still charged there.
Dominion is suing Powell for $1.3 billion over her false claims that the company rigged the election against Trump.
Wood has been subpoenaed to testify in the Georgia case.”
“A New York judge imposed a $364 million penalty Friday on Donald Trump, his companies and some executives, ruling that they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth.”
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“Engoron concluded that Trump and his co-defendants “failed to accept responsibility” for their actions and that expert witnesses who testified for the defense “simply denied reality.”
The judge called the civil fraud at the heart of the trial a “venial sin, not a mortal sin.”
“They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways,” wrote Engoron, a Democrat. He said their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” the judge added.”